Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Scout APM
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.com
Scout APM
scoutapm.comSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Scout APM |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $10/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 10 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 9.1 (#1) | 7.4 (#29) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 9.1 (#1) | 7.4 (#15) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 9.2 (#3) | 7.4 (#35) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 9.2 (#2) | 7.5 (#18) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Enterprise Software | 9.1 (#3) | 7.4 (#14) |
| Company | Grafana Labs lists its headquarters as New York, New York, USA, and its founding year as 2014. | Scout Monitoring is the product of Zimuth, Inc. |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | Listed integrations include Slack, PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, Opsgenie, Discord, Zapier, webhooks, Rollbar, Sentry, Honeybadger, Bugsnag, and GitHub. |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | Scout provides application performance monitoring and observability tools to help engineering teams identify and fix performance problems. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Scout APM
- More Anomaly Detection$10 a month
- More Errors$19 a month
- Startup$19 a month
- Small$39 a month
- More Logs$40 a month
- Production Ready$64 a month
- Medium$99 a month
- Large$299 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- FreePrice 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.
Scout APM
Scout APM is a cloud application performance monitoring and observability platform from Zimuth, Inc., available through web and API interfaces. It combines traces, metrics, logs, error tracking, and alerting for engineering teams investigating performance problems. Scout lists agents for Ruby, Python, PHP, Elixir, and Node.js. It detects slow database queries and N+1 patterns and provides query analysis. Its anomaly detection learns normal behavior for each endpoint and alerts when that behavior changes without requiring configured thresholds. An MCP server, CLI, and API let AI coding agents access production errors, traces, and performance data. Integrations include Slack, PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, Opsgenie, Discord, Zapier, webhooks, Rollbar, Sentry, Honeybadger, Bugsnag, and GitHub. The Free plan includes 300K monthly transactions, 1 GB log data, 5,000 errors, one anomaly-monitored endpoint, and unlimited users and apps. Paid plans start at $19 a month, with a 14-day trial. Human support is included on every plan; paid plans add priority response, and Enterprise includes premier support.