PagerDuty vs Grafana Cloud
A detailed comparison to help you choose between PagerDuty and Grafana Cloud.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
PagerDuty
0 reviews
3.9/5
Grafana Cloud
0 reviews
Grafana Cloud is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.7). roughly 15,000 paid customers as of fiscal year-end January 2025, including 849 with over $100K ARR Grafana Cloud provides managed Grafana, Prometheus, Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and k6 (load testing). Free tier includes 10,000 metrics series. Open source self-hosting also available.
PagerDuty Incident management and on-call scheduling platform | Grafana Cloud Open source observability platform — cloud and self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Engineering organizations where on-call reliability is critical and budget allows per-seat pricing; small teams under 5 users on the free plan. | Teams wanting a managed, self-hostable observability stack with a genuinely useful free tier and metrics, logs, and traces under one pane |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermobile appapi accessteam features | free tieropen sourceself hostableapi accessteam features |
| Visit PagerDuty → | Visit Grafana Cloud → | |
PagerDuty
Pros
- + Free plan for up to 5 users with real escalation policies and unlimited push/email
- + Most battle-tested notification and escalation machinery in the category
- + Published SLA with concrete notification-delivery commitments and credits
- + US and EU service regions on AWS with region selection at signup
- + Deep integration catalog and mature mobile apps
Cons
- - Per-seat pricing gets expensive fast; 6th user flips the whole account to paid
- - SLA is 99.9% notification delivery — competitors contract at 99.99%
- - Platform grown by acquisition; multiple surfaces, limits and fine print
- - SLA excludes free plan; no APAC service region
Grafana Cloud
Pros
- + Open source core (AGPLv3) across Grafana/Mimir/Loki/Tempo/Pyroscope — a real self-host exit
- + Permanent free tier: 10k metric series, 50 GB logs/traces/profiles, 500 k6 VUh, no credit card
- + Public Pro pricing ($19/mo platform fee, from $6.50/1k series) with automatic volume discounts
- + 42 stack regions on AWS, Azure, and GCP including a Federal Cloud option
Cons
- - Usage-based billing punishes metric cardinality and log verbosity — bills can spike on app-side mistakes
- - PromQL/LogQL and label design have a real learning curve
- - SLA is 99.5% (paid plans only) — below hyperscaler commitments
- - Some enterprise RBAC/audit/reporting features require a quote-based Enterprise plan
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