Does Grafana have a free plan?

Yes. Grafana offers a free tier with limits; paid plans unlock higher usage or team features.

What are the main drawbacks of Grafana?

The trade-offs we noted: Dashboard design takes real effort to get right; Cloud pricing scales with data volume; Configuration sprawl on large teams.

When should you not use Grafana?

Skip Grafana if: You are more than three people — the Cloud free tier allows 3 active users a month; You keep history: free retention is 14 days for metrics, logs, traces and profiles; Your volume is real: free covers 10k active series and 50 GB of logs a month, then Pro is $19/month plus usage.

Developer Tools

Grafana

Dashboards and visualisation for metrics and logs.

What it is

Grafana turns metrics, logs and traces into dashboards, and connects to almost any data source. The open-source version is fully capable; the cloud version removes the operational work. Its strength is that it does not own your data: it queries Prometheus, Loki, SQL databases and cloud providers where they already live. That also means Grafana alone is not a monitoring system, and you still have to choose and run the stores behind it.

Grafana pricing

Grafana publishes 1 plan. Paid tiers start at $19/mo.

Grafana plans and published prices, taken from the vendor’s pricing page.
Plan	Price	What the vendor’s page says
Pro	$19/mo	Pro from $19/month plus usage with volume discounts

Prices read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-07. Vendors change plans without notice — check the source before you budget. Source

Key features

Data-source agnostic
Queries Prometheus, Loki, SQL and cloud APIs without moving data into Grafana.
Alerting
Evaluates rules against queries and routes notifications to external channels.
Dashboard as code
Stores dashboards as JSON so they can be versioned and provisioned.

Strengths and trade-offs

What works well

Connects to dozens of data sources out of the box
Open source and self-hostable
Alerting built into the same tool as the dashboards

Where it falls short

Dashboard design takes real effort to get right
Cloud pricing scales with data volume
Configuration sprawl on large teams

Who it is for

Any team that needs to see what its systems are doing, from one server to a large fleet.

Pick it or skip it

Pick Grafana if

Self-hosting for free — Grafana itself is open source
Small teams trying the hosted version: no credit card needed
Dashboards over data you already collect elsewhere

Skip it if

You are more than three people — the Cloud free tier allows 3 active users a month
You keep history: free retention is 14 days for metrics, logs, traces and profiles
Your volume is real: free covers 10k active series and 50 GB of logs a month, then Pro is $19/month plus usage

Our verdict

The default choice for dashboards, and rightly so. Budget time for building the dashboards, not just installing it.

Frequently asked questions

Does Grafana have a free plan?: Yes. Grafana offers a free tier with limits; paid plans unlock higher usage or team features.
Who is Grafana best for?: Any team that needs to see what its systems are doing, from one server to a large fleet.
What are the main drawbacks of Grafana?: The trade-offs we noted: Dashboard design takes real effort to get right; Cloud pricing scales with data volume; Configuration sprawl on large teams.
When should you not use Grafana?: Skip Grafana if: You are more than three people — the Cloud free tier allows 3 active users a month; You keep history: free retention is 14 days for metrics, logs, traces and profiles; Your volume is real: free covers 10k active series and 50 GB of logs a month, then Pro is $19/month plus usage.

What we checked

Public APIOffers a documented API you can build against.Yes
Mobile appHas a native app for iOS or Android, not just a mobile website.Yes
Open source / self-hostableSource is open and the tool can be run on your own infrastructure.Yes
SSO (SAML)Supports SAML single sign-on on at least one plan.Yes

“Not checked” means exactly that — we have not verified it, and we do not guess.

Evidence and freshness

Status: Vendor pricing page verifiedReviewed: 2026-09-07

Grafana — Pricing ↗
Checked 2026-09-07 · Supports: Grafana is open source and available on GitHub, Cloud free tier: 3 active users per month, 10k active metric series, 50 GB logs ingested per month, 14 days retention, no credit card, Pro from $19/month plus usage with volume discounts

Limit: Vendor pricing page was reviewed; this record is not a ToolCompare benchmark.

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