Staxly

Grafana Cloud vs n8n

Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
vs. Source-available workflow automation — fair-code, self-host or cloud

Grafana Cloud website ↗n8n website ↗

Pricing tiers

Grafana Cloud

Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Grafana Cloud website ↗

n8n

Community (self-host)
Source-available (fair-code). Free forever. Full feature set self-hosted.
$0 base (usage-based)
Cloud Starter
€20/mo annual (~$22). 2,500 workflow executions. 5 concurrent. 1 shared project. Unlimited users.
$22/mo
Cloud Pro
€50/mo annual (~$55). Custom execution volume. 20 concurrent. 3 shared projects. 7-day insights.
$55/mo
Cloud Business
€667/mo annual (~$735). 40,000 executions. 30 concurrent. 6 projects. Self-host option. SSO, SAML, LDAP. Git version control.
$735/mo
Enterprise
Custom. 200+ concurrent. Unlimited projects. SLA. 365-day retention.
Custom
n8n website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Grafana Cloud vs starter on n8n.

MetricGrafana Cloudn8n
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Grafana Cloud · 16 features

  • Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
  • Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
  • Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
  • Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
  • Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
  • Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
  • Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
  • Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
  • Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
  • k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.
  • Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
  • Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
  • Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
  • Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
  • Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
  • Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.

n8n · 19 features

  • 500+ Integration Nodes — Apps, SaaS, DBs, cloud services, AI models.
  • AI / LangChain Nodes — AI Agent, Chain, Memory, Vector Store nodes out of box.
  • Audit Logs — Enterprise compliance logging.
  • Code Nodes (JS + Python) — Drop-in custom code nodes with full data access.
  • Credentials Vault — Encrypted credentials per service.
  • Environments — dev/staging/prod environments.
  • Error Workflows — Global + per-workflow error handlers.
  • Execution History — Full run log with inputs/outputs per node.
  • Expression Editor — JavaScript expressions for data mapping.
  • External Secrets — HashiCorp Vault + AWS Secrets + Azure Key Vault integrations.
  • Git Version Control — Version workflows in Git (Business+).
  • HTTP Request Node — Full-featured HTTP client node (any REST API).
  • Queue Mode — Redis-backed execution queue for scaling.
  • Schedule Triggers — Cron-based triggers down to the minute.
  • SSO + SAML + LDAP — Business+ authentication.
  • Sub-Workflows — Reusable child workflows.
  • Variables — Global variables + per-workflow variables.
  • Visual Editor — Drag-and-drop flow builder. Node-based canvas.
  • Webhooks — Webhook triggers + responses.

Developer interfaces

KindGrafana Cloudn8n
CLIGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-clin8n CLI
SDKFaro Web SDK (RUM)—
RESTGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push APIn8n REST API
MCP—n8n MCP
OTHERPrometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLPn8n Editor UI, Webhook Triggers
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Grafana Cloud and n8n are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.