Grafana Alternatives: Six Options If You Want Fewer Moving Parts
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
Grafana lets you assemble what you need: dashboards, Loki for logs, metrics, traces, and alerting. That flexibility also means more pieces to price, tune, and keep running. Teams move away when the per-signal bills add up, when they would rather not maintain queries and alert rules, or when they want one tool for incident response. This page compares six options. Sazabi wrote it and is one of the six.
What Grafana Charges, For Reference
Grafana Cloud has a Free plan, a self-serve Pro plan, and an Enterprise plan. Pro is listed from $19 per month plus usage. Each signal is priced on its own. Logs start at $0.050 per GB processed, $0.400 per GB written, and $0.100 per GB retained, with 50 GB ingested included and 30-day retention. Traces use the same starting rates. Metrics start at $6.50 per 1,000 active series, with 13 months of retention.
Other products have their own meters. Kubernetes Monitoring is $0.01 per host hour ($7.20 per host), and Application Observability is $0.025 per host hour ($18 per host). Incident Response and Management is $20 per active IRM user. Enterprise starts at a $25,000 annual spend commit. Loki, the log engine, is open source under AGPLv3, so self-hosting is possible too. See Grafana Cloud Pricing Explained and Sazabi vs Grafana.
Six Grafana Alternatives At A Glance
How To Choose
- What do you like about Grafana? If it is the dashboards, look for tools that can import or recreate them. If it is open source, SigNoz and a self-hosted Loki are the closest matches.
- Do you want to stop assembling parts? Logs, metrics, and traces are separate products with separate rates on Grafana Cloud. A single-meter product is simpler to forecast.
- Who responds to incidents? Grafana lists IRM as its own per-user product. Better Stack includes on-call for responders.
- How many people look at the data? Honeycomb lists unlimited seats. New Relic prices by user type. Usage-based tools mostly do not charge per seat.
SigNoz
SigNoz covers logs, traces, and metrics in one product, and its pricing page says you can send any mix of the three. Teams starts at $49 per month with $49 of usage included, which the page says covers about 163 GB of logs or traces. After that, logs and traces are $0.30 per GB and metrics are $0.10 per million samples. The page lists no host-based pricing, and unlimited teammates are included. It also lists an MCP server, and a Community Edition for teams who want full control. Enterprise offers Dedicated, BYOC, or self-hosted deployment. See Sazabi vs SigNoz.
Pick it when you want an open-source-friendly replacement with one app and one bill. Skip it when you need 30 days or more of log retention by default, since logs list 15 days.
Better Stack
Better Stack combines telemetry with incident response. Responders cost $34 monthly or $29 yearly, while team members with telemetry access are free. On-call scheduling, phone and SMS alerts, and one status page are included. Its Slack-native incident agent lists Grafana dashboard import as a feature, which matters if your dashboards are the hard part to move. Logs cost $0.15 per GB ingested and $0.08 per GB per month retained in the United States ($0.10 and $0.05 in Europe). See Sazabi vs Better Stack.
Pick it when you want logs, on-call, and status pages in one place. Skip it when you want a single plan with no per-responder fee.
Axiom
Axiom has no per-signal rates. It bills data loading compute per GB, query compute in GB-hours, and storage. The first 1,000 GB ingested each month are free, and 100 GB-hours of query compute are free. Pre-purchased compute credits over 12, 24, or 36 months carry discounts of 10% to 47% on its rate table. Add-ons are fixed monthly: SAML SSO $100, RBAC $50, Directory Sync $100, and Extended Audit Logs $50. See Sazabi vs Axiom.
Pick it when you have a large volume of events and want to commit to a term for a discount. Skip it when you want ready-made dashboards for every service.
New Relic
New Relic's free tier includes 100 GB of ingest per month and one full platform user, and it lists 50+ capabilities and 800+ integrations with unlimited hosts. New Relic says it does not charge for data egress. The free tier's default retention is at least 8 days, and storing data in the EU data center costs an additional $0.05 per GB per month. Data ingest is $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 with Data Plus. See Sazabi vs New Relic and New Relic Alternatives.
Pick it when you want one commercial platform with a free entry point. Skip it when many people need full platform access and you want to avoid user fees.
Honeycomb
Honeycomb counts events. In a trace, each span counts as one event, so a 150-span trace is 150 events. Free allows up to 20M events and 100M metric data points per month. Pro starts at $150 per month for 50M events, and goes up to 750M. The page lists unlimited seats and unlimited querying. Events and logs have a fixed 60-day retention, and time-series metrics default to 13 months. Enterprise lists a Private Cloud option. See Sazabi vs Honeycomb and Honeycomb Alternatives.
Pick it when your hardest problems are in traces and high-cardinality request data. Skip it when you mostly need log search and prebuilt infrastructure dashboards.
Sazabi
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security. In Grafana, you decide what to chart and what to alert on, then write and tune the queries. Sazabi starts from the logs you already send, with no schemas, parsing rules, or dashboards to build first. It detects issues without hand-built monitors, investigates them, and alerts in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email. When you do want charts, Sazabi can generate dashboards from your logs. Its agent can hand an investigation to your coding agent through MCP, CLI, or API.
Plans per 30-day cycle: Hobby $50, Startup $200, Growth $1,000. Each includes 200 GB ingested, 50 GB scanned, and 20 issues. As an illustration, assume 500 GB of logs a month and count only ingestion at starting list rates. Grafana Pro is $19 plus 450 GB at $0.45 (process plus write), or $221.50, before retention. Hobby is $50 plus 300 GB at $0.10, or $80, before scans above 50 GB and issues above 20. See Sazabi pricing.
Pick it when you would rather get issues than maintain alert rules. Skip it when you rely on Grafana's metrics ecosystem, PromQL dashboards, or years of custom panels.
Try An Alternative Without Dropping Grafana
If you run Grafana Alloy, add an otelcol.exporter.otlphttp block that points at your Sazabi intake URL and wire it into your logs and traces pipelines. Sazabi then receives data alongside your existing exporters. Metrics are not stored by that source, so use the separate OpenTelemetry metrics source for them. One limit matters: only otelcol.* components work. Loki sources such as loki.source.* are not OTLP-compatible and cannot route through that exporter. See Grafana Alloy on Sazabi.
Sazabi also has a Grafana Cloud MCP connector. It lets the Sazabi agent browse dashboards, run Prometheus and Loki queries, inspect Tempo traces, and review alert rules during an investigation. It needs an active Grafana Cloud stack and a role with the grafana-assistant-app.cloud-mcp:access action. See the Grafana integration.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I keep Grafana dashboards and move only the backend?
Often yes, depending on the backend. Better Stack lists dashboard import from Grafana among its incident agent features, and SigNoz and Honeycomb have their own dashboards. Check how each handles your existing queries before you commit.
How do I try Sazabi without leaving Grafana Alloy?
Add an otelcol.exporter.otlphttp component that points at your Sazabi intake URL and wire it into your existing logs and traces pipelines. Only otelcol components work with it, so Loki sources that use loki.source cannot route through that exporter.
Is there a way to avoid per-signal pricing?
Several options here use a single meter. SigNoz charges per GB for logs and traces and per million samples for metrics, Honeycomb counts events, and Sazabi counts logs ingested, logs scanned, and issues. Grafana Cloud bills process, write, and retain separately for each signal.
Does Grafana Cloud have a self-hosted or BYOC option?
Loki is released under the AGPLv3 license, and the Enterprise plan lists Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, and Bring Your Own Cloud deployment. The Enterprise plan starts at a $25,000 annual spend commit.
Sources
- Grafana Cloud plans, per-signal rates, retention, host-hour prices, IRM and AI user prices, Enterprise commit (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Loki license, label-based indexing, and the three ways to use Grafana logs (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- SigNoz plans, usage rates, retention, MCP server, Community Edition and Enterprise options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Better Stack bundles, incident agent features including Grafana dashboard import, on-call, status pages (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Axiom credit-based pricing, free allowances, pre-purchase discounts, add-ons (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- New Relic free tier, data and user pricing, retention, EU data center and egress policy (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Honeycomb plan limits, Pro price, unlimited seats, included features (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- What counts as a Honeycomb event, overage handling, retention by data type (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plans, included usage, overage rates, retention (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi product description, detection, search and dashboards (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Adding Sazabi as an otelcol.exporter.otlphttp destination in Grafana Alloy, and the Loki source limitation (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi MCP connector for Grafana Cloud, what the agent can read, prerequisites (accessed Nov 8, 2026)