Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Seq
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.com
Seq
datalust.coSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Seq |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $90.83/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | 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) | 8.6 (#23) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.2 (#3) | 8.8 (#7) |
| Company | Grafana Labs lists its headquarters as New York, New York, USA, and its founding year as 2014. | Datalust was founded in Australia in 2013 by Nicholas and Susan Blumhardt. |
| Documentation depth | The documentation covers setup, instrumentation, pricing, cost optimization, troubleshooting, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, integrations, and signal exploration. | The documentation covers ingestion, querying, dashboards, alerting, authentication, storage, backups, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, clustering, APIs and troubleshooting. |
| Founded | 2014 | 2013 |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | Documented ingestion options include Serilog, Microsoft.Extensions.Logging, OpenTelemetry, Node.js libraries, HTTP, GELF, syslog, RabbitMQ, Docker and Kubernetes. |
| 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. | Seq is proprietary subscription software; its agreement grants a non-exclusive, non-transferable internal-use license and forbids copying, resale and source-code derivation. |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | Seq is a self-hosted telemetry server that stores structured application events and makes them searchable through its web interface. |
| What it does | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. | Seq is a self-hosted, real-time server for searching and analyzing structured application logs, traces and metrics. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Seq
- IndividualFree
- IndividualFree
- Team$1,090 a year
- Standard$2,990 a year
- Datacenter$10,990 a year
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.