Our take
Pick Grafana if observability teams who will stay on Cloud Free at $0 always (usage limits, 14-day retention) while they open a first dashboard, then buy Pro from $19 / month + usage (platform fee $19 includes 10k active series) or Enterprise from $25,000 / year. Pick SigNoz if platform teams who will stay on Community Edition $0 (self-host, no card) while they ship a first OTel pipeline, then buy Cloud Teams at
Best for
Grafana Time series you edit at $0
SigNoz APM you start at $0 OSS or $49 Cloud
Free plan
Grafana $0 · always. No charges ever. All Grafana Cloud services with usage limits. 14-day retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6. Community support. Adaptive Telemetry and AI Assistant on the Free benefits
SigNoz $0 · self-host. You run the cluster, storage, upgrades, and backups. Community Slack. No Teams chat / email support
Lowest paid
Grafana Pro $19
SigNoz Enterprise $4/mo
Next step up
Grafana
SigNoz Startup program $19/mo
Runs where
Grafana Hosted
SigNoz Local; you host it
Watch out
Grafana Free retention is 14 days
SigNoz Cloud has a $49 floor
Last checked
Grafana 2026-10-23 · grafana.com/pricing
SigNoz 2026-10-22 · signoz.io/pricing
observability teams who will stay on Cloud Free at $0 always (usage limits, 14-day retention) while they open a first dashboard, then buy Pro from $19 / month + usage (platform fee $19 includes 10k active series) or Enterprise from $25,000 / year.
Read the Grafana pageplatform teams who will stay on Community Edition $0 (self-host, no card) while they ship a first OTel pipeline, then buy Cloud Teams at $49/month when they want $49 of included usage and no cluster to run.
Read the SigNoz page
