Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Uptrace
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.com
Uptrace
uptrace.devSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $39/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| 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 | 6 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 9.1 (#1) | 8.6 (#5) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 9.2 (#1) | 8.6 (#5) |
| Spec score · Observability Platforms | 9.2 (#1) | 8.6 (#7) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 9.1 (#1) | 8.6 (#5) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 9.2 (#3) | 8.6 (#13) |
| Documentation depth | The documentation covers setup, instrumentation, pricing, cost optimization, troubleshooting, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, integrations, and signal exploration. | The guides index lists 50 OpenTelemetry integration guides spanning Go, Python, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Ruby, Elixir, databases, infrastructure and AI. |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | Telemetry can arrive through OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Vector, Fluent Bit and CloudWatch, and Grafana can use Uptrace as Prometheus or Tempo data sources. |
| 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. | The main Uptrace repository is licensed AGPL-3.0; several SDK repositories use BSD-2-Clause and the Helm chart uses Apache-2.0. |
| What it does | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. | Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry-based observability and APM platform combining distributed traces, logs, metrics, dashboards and alerting. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Uptrace
- CommunityFree
- Uptrace CloudFree
- Starter$39 a month
- Team$199 a month
- Business$499 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
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.
Uptrace
Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that unifies traces, metrics and logs. It provides UQL for querying spans and logs and a PromQL-compatible engine for metrics. Dashboards can combine spans, events, logs and metrics, configured in the UI or YAML. Metric and error monitors can send notifications through email, Slack, PagerDuty and other channels. Uptrace lists Grafana integration as a Prometheus and Tempo data source and includes a built-in MCP server for AI assistants. It offers cloud and self-hosted deployment, with Docker, Ansible and Kubernetes installation options; precompiled binaries are listed for Linux, macOS and Windows. Uptrace Cloud retains data for four weeks by default, with cold storage options for up to 100 weeks. The free Cloud plan includes 50 GB per month and 5,000 timeseries per month, while Community is free with unlimited usage and 14 days of retention. Paid plans start at $39 a month. The privacy policy says data in transit and database backups are encrypted, but most live database data is not encrypted at rest.