Editor Sebastiaan Smits ·
Published October 28, 2026 · Updated October 28, 2026
Teams look past Grafana when the bill is split across a price list per signal, when running Loki, Mimir and Tempo themselves becomes a job, or when the AGPL licence is a problem for their legal team. Most go to SigNoz or Elastic for a single backend, or to a monitoring tool with its own dashboards.
Short answer: The closest replacements for Grafana in our observability and log management software ranking are SigNoz, Elastic Observability and Middleware. Choose SigNoz if you want one OpenTelemetry-native backend without assembling Loki, Mimir and Tempo. The other 12 entries come from our Best Observability & Log Management Software in 2026 list as well, and every one is set against Grafana specifically, with a note on the cases where Grafana should stay.
Visibility in our rankings can be paid for. Payment moves a vendor's position within the shortlist; it never adds a vendor, and it never changes a word of the review or of this page. The first three alternatives go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category, wherever the category has them; the established names follow in their ranked order. How it works: placement disclosure · editorial process.
Grafana Cloud lists separate pricing for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, Kubernetes monitoring, application observability, synthetics and AI. Pro adds a $19 monthly platform fee on top, and Enterprise carries a $25,000 a year minimum commit. A bill is the sum of what you switch on.
Grafana the dashboard tool does not store telemetry. Its documentation lists data sources such as Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL, and logs on the cloud plan run on Loki. Self-hosting means operating those backends, upgrading them and sizing their storage yourself.
On April 20, 2021 Grafana Labs moved its core open source projects from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3. Running it unmodified inside a company is common. Some legal teams still block AGPL software, and buyers in that position look for permissive or commercial alternatives.
Ordered by how well each fits a team leaving Grafana; our own placement among 18 ranked products is in the last column.
| # | Alternative | Headquarters | Switch if | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  SigNoz | United States | you want one OpenTelemetry-native backend without assembling Loki, Mimir and Tempo | #14 |
| 2 |  Elastic Observability | Netherlands | most of your telemetry is logs and you already know Elasticsearch | #9 |
| 3 |  Middleware | United States | you want a single per-GB rate with unlimited users and no self-hosting | #17 |
| 4 |  Coralogix | Israel | you want data kept in your own bucket and a rate card with no feature tiers | #2 |
| 5 |  Zabbix | Latvia | your real need is host and network monitoring rather than a telemetry store | #6 |
| 6 |  Checkmk | Germany | you monitor servers and networks and want pricing counted in hosts | #4 |
| 7 |  Better Stack | Czechia | you want uptime, on-call and logs in one tool with a few responders | #16 |
| 8 |  Honeycomb | United States | you debug production by asking new questions of trace events | #15 |
| 9 |  Graylog | United States | logs and security events matter more to you than metrics and traces | #3 |
| 10 |  Icinga | Germany | you want a configured-as-code monitoring core and may keep Grafana for graphs | #7 |
| 11 |  New Relic | United States | you want one hosted platform and can live with per-user pricing | #13 |
| 12 |  Dynatrace | United States | you run a large estate and want automatic discovery on a rate card | #8 |
| 13 |  Datadog | United States | you want everything under one login and accept per-host product pricing | #18 |
Open source and OpenTelemetry-native, with logs, traces and metrics in one product instead of separate backends. Cloud Teams starts at $49 a month with $49 of usage included, then $0.30 per GB for logs and traces. Seats and hosts are not charged. Self-hosting is free; dashboards exist but are built on its own query builder.
Switch from Grafana if you want one OpenTelemetry-native backend without assembling Loki, Mimir and Tempo.
Brings its own storage and search, with Kibana for dashboards on the same data. Serverless bills per GB ingested and per GB retained, from $0.07 and $0.017 respectively. It is a log-first design, so metrics-heavy teams will find querying different from PromQL, and Grafana can still read it as a data source.
Switch from Grafana if most of your telemetry is logs and you already know Elasticsearch.
A hosted platform with a flat $0.30 per GB for metrics, logs and traces, 30-day default retention and a Free Forever tier of 100 GB a month and unlimited users. Browser tests, real user sessions and synthetic checks are billed in separate units. No self-hosted edition appears on the pricing page.
Switch from Grafana if you want a single per-GB rate with unlimited users and no self-hosting.
Charges per GB by signal (logs $0.42, traces $0.16, metrics $0.06) with every feature and 24/7 support in the price. Retention is stored in a bucket you own, so cold data stays yours. Cloud only, with no free open source core to run on your own.
Switch from Grafana if you want data kept in your own bucket and a rate card with no feature tiers.
Monitoring software first, with dashboards as one feature of it rather than the product. Released under AGPLv3 from version 7.0 with no host limit, and paid support is sold separately. Its pages we checked present it as host and service monitoring, not as a trace store.
Switch from Grafana if your real need is host and network monitoring rather than a telemetry store.
Infrastructure monitoring from Germany with built-in dashboards and auto-discovery of hosts and services. Community is free for about 100 hosts, Pro starts at 190 euros a month billed annually, and Ultimate adds full-stack observability. Hosts are the billing unit, which is simpler than per-signal rates but does not fit trace-heavy workloads.
Switch from Grafana if you monitor servers and networks and want pricing counted in hosts.
Combines uptime checks, on-call scheduling, status pages and telemetry in one account. Paid plans are priced per responder at $29 a month billed annually, with unlimited team members reading telemetry at no charge. The free plan keeps logs for three days, so it suits small teams rather than long retention.
Switch from Grafana if you want uptime, on-call and logs in one tool with a few responders.
Built around high-cardinality event queries and distributed tracing rather than panels of time series. Free allows 20 million events a month, Pro starts at $150 a month for up to 750 million, and seats and querying are listed as unlimited. Teams that live in metric dashboards will have a learning curve.
Switch from Grafana if you debug production by asking new questions of trace events.
A log management and SIEM platform. Graylog Open is free under SSPL, a source-available licence that is not open source, with no volume limit. Enterprise starts at $15,000 a year, and add-ons need a licence. Its pricing page frames it around log management and SIEM, not traces.
Switch from Grafana if logs and security events matter more to you than metrics and traces.
A monitoring system configured as code, free at its core with unlimited hosts. Paid subscriptions from Icinga GmbH or partners cover packaged repositories, modules and support. Its own page lists Grafana as an integration, so many users keep Grafana for graphs and replace nothing else.
Switch from Grafana if you want a configured-as-code monitoring core and may keep Grafana for graphs.
One platform with 100 GB of free ingest a month and one free full platform user, then usage pricing per GB and per user type. Full platform users cost more than basic ones, so seat counts matter. It is hosted only, and the per-user charge is a cost Grafana does not have in its model.
Switch from Grafana if you want one hosted platform and can live with per-user pricing.
Automatic discovery and dependency mapping across hosts, containers and applications, billed from a published rate card such as $58 a month per 8 GiB host for Full-Stack Monitoring. Pricing is an annual platform-level commitment. A fully managed platform, not something you assemble from open parts.
Switch from Grafana if you run a large estate and want automatic discovery on a rate card.
Hosted only, with products priced separately per host and per volume, such as Infrastructure Pro from $15 per host per month billed annually and log ingest from $0.10 per GB. Dashboards, monitors and APM sit in one login. Costs rise with host count and with each product added.
Switch from Grafana if you want everything under one login and accept per-host product pricing.
Grafana remains the right pick when you already have telemetry in Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch or a SQL database and mainly need dashboards across all of them. It reads each of those as a data source, so a new backend can sit under it without a rebuild. The always-free tier and the self-hosted AGPL edition also make it hard to beat on entry cost.
Grafana dashboards can be exported as JSON files, and the import screen accepts JSON pasted or uploaded. That file describes Grafana panels. The queries inside are written for each data source (PromQL, LogQL, SQL), so a new backend with its own query language means rebuilding panels by hand.
Alert rules, contact points and notification policies live in Grafana and are not carried by the dashboard JSON. List them before the move and recreate them in the new tool, then run both in parallel for a few weeks so a missed rule does not become a missed incident.
If your data is already shipped with OpenTelemetry, most alternatives accept the same protocol, so you can change the destination instead of the instrumentation. Collectors tied to Grafana's own Alloy or agents may need a config change. Test one service end to end before moving the rest.
Yes, the documentation describes exporting a dashboard as a JSON file, and as a PDF on Grafana Enterprise. The JSON only helps if the new tool imports Grafana format. Otherwise it is a reference for rebuilding panels, since the queries are written for your data sources.
No. Grafana reads Elasticsearch, Prometheus, PostgreSQL and many other stores as data sources, so you can change where telemetry lives and keep the dashboards. A full switch is only needed when you also want to leave the dashboard layer or its billing.
The software is licensed under AGPLv3 and can be run on your own servers at no licence cost. You pay for the infrastructure and for the people running it. Grafana Enterprise, which adds features such as PDF export, is a paid product.
The pricing page lists retention of 14 days on Free and 13 months for metrics and 30 days for logs on Pro. Treat history as something to copy out before you cancel, because a new tool will not inherit it. Check the terms for deletion timing.
Pro is a $19 monthly platform fee plus usage, and Enterprise starts at a $25,000 a year commit. Pricing is volume-based and tiered, so rates fall as volume grows. Use the vendor's calculator with your current series and GB, then compare it with the alternative's calculator.
Grafana reads Prometheus natively, and Icinga lists Prometheus among its integrations. Confirm remote write or scrape support in the docs of any other tool you pick. Teams standardizing on OpenTelemetry have the widest choice, as SigNoz and Honeycomb both state OpenTelemetry support.
Every price, plan limit and product statement about Grafana here was read on the vendors' own pages on October 28, 2026. Either can change at any time, so read the figures as of that day.
Sebastiaan Smits, Founder, wrote, edited and fact-checked this page.
Founder of The Interregnum and of 2 Steps Ahead, an AI search visibility agency. Editorially responsible for every page here; research and drafting are AI-assisted. Last reviewed October 28, 2026.
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