Grafana Cloud vs Plausible Analytics
Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
vs. Privacy-first web analytics — cookieless, no GDPR/CCPA nightmare
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
Plausible Analytics
Self-Hosted (CE)
Community Edition — AGPL-licensed, run on your own infra.
$0 base (usage-based)
Starter
$9/month. 1 site. Basic dashboard, goals, 3-year data retention.
$9/mo
Growth
$14/month. 3 sites + 3 team members. Shared dashboards + team mgmt.
$14/mo
Business
$19/month. 10 sites + 10 members. Custom properties, API access, funnels, 5-year retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SSO, managed proxy, priority support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Grafana Cloud vs starter on Plausible Analytics.
| Metric | Grafana Cloud | Plausible Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Plausible Analytics · 16 features
- 404 Error Tracking — Auto-detect 404 pages.
- Custom Properties — Attach arbitrary properties to events (Business+).
- Email/Slack Reports — Weekly + monthly reports to email/Slack.
- File Download Tracking — Track PDF/DOC/ZIP downloads.
- Funnels — Multi-step funnel analysis (Business+).
- Goals & Conversions — Track custom events + pageview-based goals.
- Import from Google Analytics — Import historical GA data via script.
- Managed Proxy (Ent) — Proxy plausible.io through your domain to bypass ad-blockers.
- Outbound Link Tracking — One-line extension to track outbound clicks.
- Revenue Goals — Track $ amounts per goal. Great for e-commerce.
- Self-Hosting — Run via Docker. AGPL Community Edition.
- Shared Dashboards — Public or password-protected share links.
- Single-page Dashboard — All your metrics on one page: visitors, pageviews, sources, devices, countries, …
- Stats API — Pull data into your own tools via REST. Business+.
- Team Management — Owners, admins, viewers per site.
- UTM Campaigns — Track utm_source/medium/campaign automatically.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Grafana Cloud | Plausible Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli | — |
| SDK | Faro Web SDK (RUM) | @nuxtjs/plausible + plugins, plausible-tracker (npm) |
| REST | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API | Events API, Plausible Stats API, Sites Management API |
| OTHER | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP | Tracker Script (<script>) |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Grafana Cloud and Plausible Analytics are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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