Dynatrace vs Grafana Cloud
Dynatrace and Grafana Cloud are both uptime & monitoring tools. Dynatrace is aimed at enterprise and developers, while Grafana Cloud is aimed at developers and enterprise. Only Grafana Cloud has a free plan.
AI-driven observability and app security for large cloud estates
Open-source observability dashboards
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium · $19 |
| Starting price | Not published | $19/mo |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Free trial | 15 days | 14 days |
| Built for | Enterprise, Developers | Developers, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | US · 2005 | US · 2014 |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose Dynatrace if
Large enterprises running complex hybrid or Kubernetes environments that want automatic instrumentation and AI root-cause analysis.
- Automatic discovery and instrumentation save weeks of manual setup
- Root-cause analysis cuts alert noise better than threshold-based tools
- One platform covers APM, infrastructure, logs, RUM and runtime security
Look elsewhere if: Startups and small teams that need a cheap, self-serve monitoring tool (Datadog, New Relic or Grafana Cloud are easier entry points).
Choose Grafana Cloud if
Engineering teams comfortable with open-source observability who want control and lower cost.
- Open source with no lock-in
- Generous free cloud tier
- Visualizes almost any data source
Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting turnkey, fully integrated APM (Datadog, New Relic).
Dynatrace vs Grafana Cloud pricing
Dynatrace
- Foundation & Discovery$7/host/moBasic host health and discovery; billed per host-hour
- Infrastructure Monitoring$29/host/moHosts, processes and networks; $0.04 per host-hour
- Full-Stack Monitoring$58/8 GiB host/moAPM, tracing, code-level analysis; Kubernetes pods included
- Log Analytics$0.20/GiBIngest price; retention and queries billed separately or bundled
- Real User Monitoring$2.25/1,000 sessions$4.50 per 1,000 with Session Replay; 35-day retention
Grafana Cloud
- Free$010k metrics series, 50 GB logs/traces, 3 users, 14-day retention
- Pro$19/moPlatform fee plus usage; 3 users included, then $8/user
- Enterprise$25,000/yrMinimum annual spend commit; custom retention
Dynatrace · Key features
- OneAgent auto-instruments hosts, containers, processes and code with one install
- Smartscape topology map of live service and infrastructure dependencies
- Grail data lakehouse for logs, metrics, traces and events queried with DQL
- Causal AI that collapses alert storms into a single root-cause problem
- Real user monitoring with session replay and synthetic browser checks
- Runtime vulnerability analytics and application protection on monitored hosts
Cons
- Requires an annual spend commitment, so not suited to small teams
- Consumption pricing across many meters is hard to forecast
- DQL and the platform's breadth take real time to learn
Grafana Cloud · Key features
- Dashboards over 150+ data sources
- Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir)
- Logs with Loki and traces with Tempo
- Alerting, on-call and incident response
- k6 load testing and synthetic monitoring
- Self-hosted open source or managed cloud
Cons
- More setup than Datadog
- Query languages to learn (PromQL, LogQL)
- Fragmented product surface
Dynatrace vs Grafana Cloud: FAQ
Do Dynatrace and Grafana Cloud have a free plan?
Dynatrace has no free plan, a 15-day free trial. Grafana Cloud has a free plan.