Grafana Cloud vs Render
Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
vs. Unified cloud for apps, databases, and static sites
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
Render
Postgres — Free
30-day limit. 256 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU, 1 GB storage. Rotates.
Free
Hobby (Free)
Free workspace. 1 project, 2 envs, 100 GB bandwidth. Includes free Web Services + static sites + dev DB.
Free
Key Value (Redis) — Free
25 MB. Ephemeral.
Free
Web Service — Free
Free (spins down with idle). 512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU.
Free
Postgres — Basic
256 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU. Always-on.
$6/mo
Web Service — Starter
Always-on. 512 MB RAM, 0.5 CPU.
$7/mo
Key Value — Starter
256 MB RAM.
$10/mo
Professional
$19/user/month. Unlimited projects, 500 GB bandwidth, up to 10 team members.
$19/mo
Web Service — Standard
Always-on. 2 GB RAM, 1 CPU.
$25/mo
Organization
$29/user/month. Unlimited members, 1 TB bandwidth, compliance certs.
$29/mo
Postgres — Pro
4 GB RAM, 1 CPU.
$55/mo
Web Service — Pro
Always-on. 4 GB RAM, 2 CPU.
$85/mo
Web Service — Pro Plus
Always-on. 8 GB RAM, 4 CPU.
$175/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Centralized team management, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Grafana Cloud vs hobby on Render.
| Metric | Grafana Cloud | Render |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Render · 13 features
- Autoscaling — Metric-based autoscale of instances.
- Background Workers — Process queue workers. No HTTP entrypoint.
- Blueprints (render.yaml) — Infrastructure-as-code config for all services.
- Cron Jobs — Scheduled Docker jobs.
- Custom Domains — Free SSL, automatic cert renewal.
- DDoS Protection — Built-in.
- Persistent Disks — Attach persistent SSD to services.
- Preview Environments — Per-PR preview envs with their own DB and services.
- Private Services — Internal services not exposed to the public internet.
- Render Key Value (Redis) — Managed Redis-compatible key-value store.
- Render Postgres — Managed PostgreSQL with automated backups.
- Static Sites — Git-backed static hosting with global CDN, free SSL.
- Web Services — Long-running HTTP services with auto-scale + health checks.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Grafana Cloud | Render |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli | Render CLI |
| SDK | Faro Web SDK (RUM) | — |
| REST | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API | Render REST API |
| MCP | — | Render MCP |
| OTHER | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP | — |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Grafana Cloud and Render are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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