groundcover vs Retina
groundcover
groundcover.comRetina
retina.shSide by side
| Figure | groundcover | Retina |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $30/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 0 |
| Spec score · eBPF Observability Tools | 8.4 (#6) | 7.0 (#26) |
| Deployment | Bring Your Own Cloud deploys the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it, and the UI is hosted by groundcover. | Retina is installed into an existing Kubernetes cluster using Helm. |
| Integrations | Listed integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. | Retina integrates with Cilium Hubble for additional network insights, including flow logs and DNS information. |
| Product | groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform powered by eBPF for monitoring production environments. | Retina is an open-source Kubernetes network observability platform for monitoring application health, network health, and security. |
| Support | Standard support offers business-hours availability with stated response targets from under 8 hours for critical issues to under 72 hours for low-priority issues. | The project directs bug reports and feature requests to GitHub issues and lists [email protected] for other maintainer contact. |
Plans
In their own words
groundcover
groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform for monitoring production environments. Its eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs, and traces without code changes or manual instrumentation, processes data at the edge, and the product states that ingestion happens in real time without sampling. Bring Your Own Cloud deployment puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it and hosts the UI. Fully On-Prem deployment places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. Integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. Agent Mode can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries, and OTTL pipelines. The Free plan is free forever and includes 12-hour data retention and Slack Community support; paid plans start at $30 per host per month. Billing is based on average monthly monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts, not telemetry volume. The platform is available on Linux, self-hosted, and web.