Checkly vs Grafana Cloud

Checkly is a synthetic monitoring platform from Berlin built on the idea of monitoring as code. Engineering teams write API checks and browser checks in JavaScript or TypeScript, using Playwright for browser flows, keep them in the same repository as the application, and deploy them with the Checkly CLI or Terraform.

The same checks run in CI against preview deployments before a release and then continuously from global locations after it, so a broken login or checkout flow is caught by a test first and by monitoring second. Assertions, retries, alert channels such as Slack, PagerDuty and email, multistep API checks and heartbeat monitors are available, and traces connect a failed check to backend spans through OpenTelemetry. A free Hobby plan includes a monthly quota of API and browser check runs; Starter and Team plans add runs, locations and collaboration, and Enterprise adds SSO and private locations inside your own network.

Checkly fits teams that already write Playwright tests and want one source of truth for end-to-end testing and production monitoring. It requires coding and is not a full observability suite, so it is a poor fit for non-technical teams who only want uptime pings. Better Stack and UptimeRobot are simpler for basic uptime and status pages, Datadog Synthetics suits teams already on Datadog, and Grafana Cloud offers synthetic monitoring inside its own stack.

Grafana is the open-source standard for observability dashboards, built by Grafana Labs, a company founded in 2014 around the project created by Torkel Ödegaard and now headquartered in New York. Grafana visualizes data from more than 150 sources, including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Postgres, cloud monitoring services and SaaS tools, without moving data into a single store.

Grafana Labs packages its open-source projects into the LGTM stack: Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces and Mimir for Prometheus-compatible metrics, with Pyroscope for continuous profiling. Grafana Cloud runs this stack as a managed service and adds alerting, on-call and incident response, k6 load testing, synthetic monitoring, application observability and frontend monitoring. The free cloud tier includes metrics series, logs, traces and a few users; Pro is usage-based, and Enterprise adds enterprise data source plugins and support. Everything can also be self-hosted under the AGPL license.

Grafana suits engineering teams that are comfortable with open-source tools and want control over cost and data. Assembling and tuning the stack takes more work than a turnkey vendor, PromQL and LogQL need learning, and the product surface feels fragmented. Datadog and New Relic are more integrated but usually more expensive, while Elastic Observability is the main alternative for log-heavy teams.