The closest alternatives to Grafana Cloud on Lister are Datadog, New Relic and Dynatrace, the companies that share the most rankings with it. Each is compared below on its stated best fit, starting price and Lister Score.
How to choose an alternative to Grafana Cloud
Start from what you need it for. Where each fits best, as Lister records it:
- Datadog: Large enterprises and DevOps teams
- New Relic: Software engineers and developers
- Dynatrace: Large enterprises with complex cloud environments
- AppDynamics: Business transaction performance tracking
- Elastic APM: Organisations already using Elasticsearch who need cost-effective APM
- Honeycomb: Debugging complex microservices
- Splunk APM: Large organisations with complex logging requirements already using Splunk
- Prometheus: DevOps teams and organisations standardised on Kubernetes wanting flexible, cost-effective infrastructure monitoring
- Sentry: Full-stack application error monitoring and performance tracking
- LogicMonitor: Infrastructure and network monitoring
Closest to Grafana Cloud by the rankings they share: Datadog (2 rankings), New Relic (2 rankings) and Dynatrace (2 rankings).
Free to start, by their stated pricing: Elastic APM, Prometheus and Sentry.
Stated starting prices: Datadog ($15/host/month), New Relic ($49/month), Honeycomb ($130 per month) and Splunk APM ($200 per month).
Custom or quote-based pricing: Dynatrace, AppDynamics and LogicMonitor.
Each Lister Score is the alternative's score on the ranking named in its row, so compare scores within one ranking rather than across rankings. How the score is made.
Each alternative in brief
01
Cloud scale monitoring and security
#1 in Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring: Datadog provides comprehensive real-time visibility into application performance, infrastructure, and logs across cloud and on-premise environments. It offers integrated monitoring for multiple technologies and supports hundreds of integrations out of the box.
PROS- Extremely powerful analytics
- Thousands of integrations
CONS- Steep learning curve
- Complex pricing structure
95.0
02
All-in-one observability platform
#2 in Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring: New Relic delivers end-to-end observability combining APM, infrastructure monitoring, synthetic testing and real user monitoring. It simplifies troubleshooting through a unified interface and provides detailed service maps for microservices architectures.
PROS- Deep application insights
- Unified telemetry data
CONS- Can be costly for small projects
- Overwhelming interface for beginners
92.7
03
Software intelligence for the enterprise cloud
#3 in Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring: Dynatrace uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically discover dependencies, detect anomalies and diagnose root causes in complex application environments. It excels at monitoring containerised and microservices architectures with deep code-level insights.
PROS- Advanced AI root cause analysis
- Full automation capabilities
CONS- Very high cost
- Overkill for simple websites
90.3
04
#7 in Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring: AppDynamics provides comprehensive application performance monitoring with real-time analytics and business transaction monitoring. It offers detailed visibility into application code and user experience metrics aligned with business outcomes.
PROS- Excellent business transaction mapping
- Robust enterprise support
CONS- Dated user interface design
81.0
05
Open-source APM integrated with the Elastic Stack
#4 in Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring: Elastic APM is part of the Elastic Stack, offering lightweight APM agents that integrate seamlessly with Elasticsearch. It provides application performance monitoring, logs and metrics in one platform with full source code availability.
PROS- Significantly lower cost compared to proprietary competitors
- Seamless integration with Elasticsearch and Kibana for logs and metrics
CONS- Requires more operational expertise to deploy and maintain
- Smaller feature set compared to fully managed enterprise platforms
88.0
06
#5 in Top 10 Monitoring & Observability Platforms: An observability platform built for high cardinality data, helping engineering teams inspect systems and debug complex distributed systems.
PROS- Outstanding for finding unknown unknowns
- Fast query performance on massive datasets
CONS- Requires instrumentation effort using OpenTelemetry
- Niche focus compared to all in one suites
85.7
07
Real-time APM for microservices and distributed systems
#5 in Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring: Splunk APM delivers real-time monitoring of distributed applications with integrated analysis of logs, metrics and traces. It focuses on helping teams quickly identify and resolve performance issues in microservices architectures.
PROS- Powerful correlation between traces, logs and metrics for root cause analysis
- Strong integration with Splunk ecosystem for organisations with existing investment
CONS- Expensive for teams not already using Splunk infrastructure
- Complex pricing model can be difficult to forecast
85.7
08
Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit for containerised environments
#6 in Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring: Prometheus is a widely adopted open-source monitoring system designed for reliability and scalability. It collects time-series metrics via pull-based HTTP requests and includes a powerful query language for analysis and alerting.
PROS- Completely free and open-source with no vendor lock-in
- Purpose-built for Kubernetes and microservices with native container integration
CONS- Requires operational expertise and internal management of infrastructure
- Limited built-in dashboarding and visualisation compared to commercial alternatives
83.3
09
Application monitoring and error tracking software
#6 in Top 10 Monitoring & Observability Platforms: An error tracking and application monitoring platform that helps developers identify and fix crashes in real time.
PROS- Excellent stack trace context
- Supports a vast array of programming languages
CONS- Can become expensive at scale
83.3
10
#7 in Top 10 Monitoring & Observability Platforms: A SaaS based infrastructure monitoring platform designed for hybrid enterprise environments and managed service providers.
PROS- Strong out of the box network device monitoring
- Reliable automated alert thresholds
CONS- User interface feels dated
- Limited native application tracing compared to APM leaders
81.0