Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Grafana Loki
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comGrafana Loki
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.2 (#6) | 9.4 (#3) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.2 (#3) | 9.2 (#4) |
| Spec score · Log Analysis Software | 9.2 (#3) | 9.1 (#4) |
| Documentation depth | The documentation covers setup, instrumentation, pricing, cost optimization, troubleshooting, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, integrations, and signal exploration. | The documentation covers architecture, deployment modes, configuration, ingestion clients, operations, multi-tenancy, LogQL, APIs, troubleshooting, upgrades and release notes. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | Official documentation lists Grafana Alloy as the recommended collector and describes OpenTelemetry, Promtail, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Vector, Logstash and other clients. |
| License | The Grafana open-source project is distributed under AGPL-3.0-only, with listed Apache-2.0 exceptions; Grafana Cloud itself is a managed service. | Grafana states that Loki is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | Loki is a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from applications and infrastructure. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.5 out of 5 from 209 reviews | 219 reviews are listed for Grafana Labs, the maker of Loki; the profile shows 155 five-star, 62 four-star, 1 three-star and 1 one-star review counts. |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.6 out of 5 from 437 ratings | 4.6 out of 5 from 348 ratings for Grafana Cloud, the managed Loki platform |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 8.6 out of 10 from 173 reviews | 8.1 out of 10 from 21 reviews |
| Security and compliance | Grafana Cloud lists FedRAMP, NATSEC100, PCI DSS, A-LIGN, SOC Type II, and GDPR credentials or compliance claims. | Grafana Labs’ trust center lists SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, PCI DSS 4.0.1, GDPR, FedRAMP High and other attestations for its services. |
| What it does | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. | Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant system for collecting, storing and querying logs. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Grafana Loki
- Grafana Cloud Logs FreeFree
- Grafana Loki OSS self-hostedFree
- Loki (self-hosted)Free
- Grafana Cloud Logs Pro$19 a month
- Grafana Cloud Logs EnterprisePrice not published
In their own words
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Grafana Cloud Application Observability monitors applications and brings OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data together to help software engineers investigate anomalies and their causes. Its knowledge graph discovers services and relationships from telemetry, while the service catalog displays latency, error ratio, and request rate for each service. The RCA workbench and Entity Graph help investigate correlated problems across a stack. Metrics, logs, traces, and profiles share a unified view, with drill-down from a service into its signals. Grafana identifies Alloy as a collector with native pipelines for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. The free plan includes up to 2,232 host hours per month and community support. Pro is listed at $0.03 a month, with a $19 monthly platform fee and $0.025 per host hour; host hours and application telemetry are billed at standard Grafana Cloud rates. Serverless usage is billed on telemetry ingested instead of host hours. The cloud service runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and the web.
Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is a free, AGPLv3-licensed log aggregation system for storing and querying application and infrastructure logs. It can be self-hosted on Linux or accessed through Grafana Cloud Logs plans, with API support and live log tailing. Loki scales horizontally, supports high availability and multiple tenants, and indexes labels instead of log-line contents. LogQL provides queries in Grafana or the LogCLI command-line tool. Grafana describes object-storage support for high-throughput, durable, petabyte-scale retention. Loki can evaluate alerting rules on incoming logs and send results to Prometheus Alertmanager, with native integrations for Prometheus, Grafana, and Kubernetes. Documented ingestion options include Grafana Alloy, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes Monitoring Helm, Docker, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, and Logstash. Installation methods include Helm, Tanka, Docker, Docker Compose, local installation, and source builds. Cloud plans range from free to paid Pro and Enterprise options.