# Better Stack vs Grafana Cloud

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/betterstack-vs-grafana-cloud/

Every value below is read from Better Stack's and Grafana Cloud's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Better Stack | Grafana Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Entry paid plan | From $29/month, or $34/month depending on the plan selected; Better Stack advertises both figures as starting prices on the same page. | $19/month platform fee for Pro, which includes 10,000 active series before usage billing starts. |
| Pricing model | One plan covering uptime monitoring, log management and error tracking together, with exceptions counted per month and web events metered by volume and retention rather than by count. | A $19 platform fee plus metered usage, with volume discounts applied automatically rather than negotiated. The enterprise tier starts at a $25,000 annual spend commitment. |
| Retention window | 90 days for errors and session replays. Logs, traces and web events are retained 3 days on the free personal plan, where retention is what the 3 GB allowance buys rather than a fixed window. | 13 months for metrics and 30 days for logs, traces, profiles and k6 tests on Pro. The free tier is 14 days for everything. |

## Where they differ

### Entry paid plan

- Better Stack: From $29/month, or $34/month depending on the plan selected; Better Stack advertises both figures as starting prices on the same page. ([source](https://betterstack.com/pricing))
- Grafana Cloud: $19/month platform fee for Pro, which includes 10,000 active series before usage billing starts. ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/))

### Pricing model

- Better Stack: One plan covering uptime monitoring, log management and error tracking together, with exceptions counted per month and web events metered by volume and retention rather than by count. ([source](https://betterstack.com/pricing))
- Grafana Cloud: A $19 platform fee plus metered usage, with volume discounts applied automatically rather than negotiated. The enterprise tier starts at a $25,000 annual spend commitment. ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/))

### Retention window

- Better Stack: 90 days for errors and session replays. Logs, traces and web events are retained 3 days on the free personal plan, where retention is what the 3 GB allowance buys rather than a fixed window. ([source](https://betterstack.com/pricing))
- Grafana Cloud: 13 months for metrics and 30 days for logs, traces, profiles and k6 tests on Pro. The free tier is 14 days for everything. ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Better Stack if Teams who would otherwise buy uptime monitoring, log management and error tracking separately, and would rather have one bill and one dashboard.

Pick Grafana Cloud if Metrics-heavy monitoring where 13 months of retention matters — that window is an order of magnitude beyond what the error trackers and most telemetry platforms keep.

Consider something else: Better Stack — Web event retention is 3 days on the free plan, which is short enough to miss a Monday-morning investigation of a Friday-night incident.

Consider something else: Grafana Cloud — Logs and traces get 30 days rather than 13 months, so the headline retention figure does not describe most of what you send it.

## Documented by only one

- Events included: Better Stack: 100,000 exceptions and 5,000 session replays a month on the free personal plan, plus 30 GB metrics and 3 GB each of logs, traces and web events. Six meters, priced separately: exceptions at $0.000050 each, replays at $0.00150, metrics at $0.50 per GB per month.
- Session replay: Better Stack: Supported
- Self-hostable: Grafana Cloud: Supported
- Ingest price per GB: Grafana Cloud: From $0.050 per GB processed, falling to $0.046 above 10,000 GB and $0.044 above 25,000 with automatic volume discounts.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Better Stack or Grafana Cloud?**

Better Stack: From $29/month, or $34/month depending on the plan selected; Better Stack advertises both figures as starting prices on the same page.
Grafana Cloud: $19/month platform fee for Pro, which includes 10,000 active series before usage billing starts.

**Should I choose Better Stack or Grafana Cloud?**

Pick Better Stack if Teams who would otherwise buy uptime monitoring, log management and error tracking separately, and would rather have one bill and one dashboard.
Pick Grafana Cloud if Metrics-heavy monitoring where 13 months of retention matters — that window is an order of magnitude beyond what the error trackers and most telemetry platforms keep.