Better Stack vs Grafana
No clear leader: Grafana (63.8) and Better Stack (60.3) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for observability tools. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Better Stack
Observability platform offering tracing, logging, infrastructure monitoring, error tracking, incident management, and real user monitoring. Positioned as significantly more cost-effective than competitors like Datadog.
Grafana
A full-stack observability platform that ingests telemetry data from multiple sources and provides dashboards, alerting, incident management, and AI-assisted troubleshooting. Supports open standards including OpenTelemetry and can be deployed as a cloud service or self-hosted.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Better Stack
From $25/month for telemetry or $29/month for on-call. Free tier included. Annual commitment provides ~22-25% savings.
- FreeFree
- 10 monitors & heartbeats
- 1 status page
- Slack & email alerts
- 100,000 exceptions per month
- 5,000 session replays
- Responder$29/month billed annually or $34/month billed monthly
- 1 responder license
- Unlimited phone call alerts
- Unlimited SMS alerts
- On-call scheduling & iOS/Android apps
- Incident management with AI SRE
- +5 more
- Telemetry - Nano$25/month annually or $30/month monthly
- 40 GB traces
- 40 GB logs
- 40 GB metrics
- 30 day retention
- Telemetry - Micro$100/month annually or $120/month monthly
- 160 GB traces
- 160 GB logs
- 160 GB metrics
- 30 day retention
- Telemetry - Mega$210/month annually or $250/month monthly
- 340 GB traces
- 340 GB logs
- 340 GB metrics
- 30 day retention
- Telemetry - Tera$420/month annually or $500/month monthly
- 700 GB traces
- 700 GB logs
- 700 GB metrics
- 30 day retention
Grafana
Free forever tier always available. Pro plans from $19/month + usage with volume discounts. Enterprise from $25,000/year with custom terms.
- FreeFree
- All Grafana Cloud services with limited usage
- Community support
- 14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6 performance tests
- ProFrom $19/month + usage with automatic volume discounts
- Everything in Free plan
- Pay as you go above free tier with volume discounts
- 8×5 email support
- 13 months retention for metrics; 30 days retention for logs, traces, profiles, k6 performance tests
- Adaptive Logs and Metrics cost optimization
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Premium support
- Custom retention policies
- Deployment flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or Bring Your Own Cloud)
- As low as $3 per 1k series for metrics at scale
- Custom pricing based on annual commit and volume
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
- Prometheus
- AWS
Better Stack
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Linear
- GitHub
- Grafana
- Datadog
- Notion
- Sentry
- Zapier
- Zabbix
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- New Relic
- Mixpanel
- Intercom
- Front
- Drift
- Terraform Provider
Grafana
- Loki
- Elasticsearch
- InfluxDB
- Postgres
- Kubernetes
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.