Grafana Cloud vs PagerDuty
Grafana Cloud and PagerDuty are both uptime & monitoring tools aimed at developers and enterprise. Grafana Cloud costs less, from $19/mo versus $25/mo for PagerDuty. Both have a free plan.
Open-source observability dashboards
On-call scheduling, alerting and incident response for ops teams
| Pricing | Freemium · $19 | Freemium · $25 |
| Starting price | $19/mo | $25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days |
| Built for | Developers, Enterprise | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses |
| Platforms | web | web, ios, android |
| Country | US · 2014 | US · 2009 |
| Rating | — | — |
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).
Choose PagerDuty if
Engineering and IT operations teams that run critical production services and need proven on-call paging and incident coordination.
- Highly reliable paging, the industry reference for on-call
- Largest integration catalogue among incident tools
- Free plan is enough for very small teams
Look elsewhere if: Small teams wanting cheap, bundled uptime monitoring and paging (Better Stack, Grafana Cloud IRM).
Grafana Cloud vs PagerDuty pricing
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
PagerDuty
- Free$0Up to 5 users, 1 schedule, 100 SMS/phone alerts a month
- Professional$25/user/mo$21/user/mo billed annually; post-incident reviews
- Starter (Platform)$2,800/yr10 seats, 5,000 events, 1,000 AI actions; billed upfront
- Essential (Platform)$12,000/yr20 seats, 40,000 events, 4,000 AI actions
- Plus (Platform)$48,000/yr50 seats, 150,000 events, 16,000 AI actions
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
PagerDuty · Key features
- On-call schedules, overrides and multi-level escalation policies
- Alert routing, grouping and deduplication from 700+ integrations
- Push, SMS, phone and email notifications with mobile acknowledgement
- Incident channels and actions inside Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Post-incident reviews and operational analytics
- AIOps add-on for event correlation and noise reduction
Cons
- Costs rise fast with AIOps, status pages and automation add-ons
- Packaging and plan names change often, making comparisons hard
- Platform tiers require annual upfront payment
Grafana Cloud vs PagerDuty: FAQ
Which is cheaper, Grafana Cloud or PagerDuty?
Grafana Cloud starts at $19/mo and PagerDuty at $25/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do Grafana Cloud and PagerDuty have a free plan?
Yes, both Grafana Cloud and PagerDuty have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.
Which is better for small businesses, Grafana Cloud or PagerDuty?
PagerDuty lists small businesses as a core audience, while Grafana Cloud is aimed more at developers and enterprise.