Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs YourKit .NET Profiler
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comYourKit .NET Profiler
yourkit.comSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | YourKit .NET Profiler |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $8.25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 10 |
| Spec score · Profiling Software | 9.2 (#1) | 7.9 (#11) |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | YourKit .NET Profiler profiles performance and memory in .NET and .NET Core applications. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
YourKit .NET Profiler
- Open source and free licenseFree
- Seat — annual subscription, single-seat$99 a year
- Seat — perpetual, single-seat$129, paid once
- Seat — annual subscription, five-seat$299 a year
- Seat — perpetual, five-seat$389, paid once
- Floating — annual subscription, single-user$499 a year
- Floating — perpetual, single-user$649, paid once
- Floating — annual subscription, five-user$1,499 a year
- Floating — perpetual, five-user$1,949, paid once
- 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.
YourKit .NET Profiler
YourKit.NET Profiler analyzes CPU performance and memory use in.NET and.NET Core applications. It can profile servers, Windows services, and other.NET applications locally or remotely in development, testing, and production. CPU results appear as call trees or hot spots; memory tools visualize the object heap and object graph. Plugins integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider. The profiler shows slow SQL queries and ASPX requests and supports MongoDB and Cassandra. More than 20 inspections can identify duplicated objects, unclosed database connections, inefficient collections, and I/O operations. Remote profiling can create an SSH tunnel to an application on another machine. A.NET API manages profiling modes and captures snapshots, while command-line tools can automate profiling and performance monitoring in continuous integration. Version 2026.9 supports.NET 5 through.NET 10 and.NET Framework 4.x, with Linux, macOS, and Windows downloads. A single-seat annual subscription costs $99 a year; a perpetual single-seat license costs $129 as a one-time purchase. A 15-day trial is listed, and qualifying open source project contributors and Microsoft MVPs can contact sales regarding a free license.