Grafana Cloud vs Portkey
Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
vs. Enterprise AI gateway + observability + guardrails + prompt mgmt
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
Portkey
Developer (Free)
Free forever. 10k logs/month. Universal API + key management. 3 prompt templates. Basic observability.
Free
Gateway (OSS)
MIT-licensed gateway only (no observability UI). Self-host for routing/fallbacks.
$0 base (usage-based)
Production
$49/month. 100k logs ($9 per additional 100k). Fallbacks, load balancing, retries, semantic caching. Unlimited prompts. RBAC.
$49/mo
Enterprise
Custom. 10M+ logs/month. Custom guardrails, advanced evals, SSO, budget controls, VPC + on-prem, SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Grafana Cloud vs free on Portkey.
| Metric | Grafana Cloud | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Portkey · 18 features
- AI Gateway — Unified OpenAI-compatible API to 250+ LLMs.
- Alerts — Thresholds on latency, error rate, cost, usage.
- Budget Controls — Per-key + per-team spending limits.
- Evaluations — Built-in evaluator templates + custom.
- Fallbacks — Config-driven provider fallback chains.
- Guardrails — Pre/post processors for safety + compliance.
- Load Balancing — Round-robin, weighted, least-latency across providers.
- MCP Support — Use MCP servers as tools through gateway.
- Observability — Logs, traces, feedback, alerts, cost tracking.
- OSS Gateway — Open-source gateway (portkey-ai/gateway).
- Prompt Library — Shared prompt library + public marketplace.
- Prompt Templates — Version + test + collaborate on prompts.
- Retries — Configurable retry policies per route.
- Role-Based Access Control — Team permissions on prompts + keys.
- Semantic Caching — Vector-based cache on query meaning.
- Simple Caching — Exact-match cache.
- Virtual Keys — Per-app keys with budget + rate limits + permissions.
- VPC Deployment (Ent) — Deploy in your own VPC for compliance.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Grafana Cloud | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli | Portkey CLI |
| SDK | Faro Web SDK (RUM) | portkey-ai (Node), portkey-ai (Python) |
| REST | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API | Portkey API (OpenAI-compat) |
| MCP | — | Portkey MCP |
| OTHER | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP | Portkey Dashboard |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Grafana Cloud and Portkey are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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