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Axiom vs Grafana Cloud: pricing, quotas & features (2025)

Observability for logs, traces, events — serverless-first, infinite scale
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana

Data sourced from vendor documentation · Last updated May 2026

Axiom website ↗Grafana Cloud website ↗

Summary

Axiom and Grafana Cloud are both monitoring platforms, addressing the same core use case with different implementation philosophies and trade-offs. Both offer a free tier, making it easy to prototype without a credit card. Grafana Cloud's paid plans start at $19/month, lower than Axiom's entry point at $25/month. Grafana Cloud has a broader documented feature set (16 vs 15 features). Budget-sensitive teams will find Grafana Cloud easier to justify early on. All pricing and quota data below is sourced from Axiom and Grafana Cloud's official documentation — not generated by AI or estimated.

Axiom vs Grafana Cloud: Comparativa de precios, cuotas y características (2025)

En esta comparativa analizamos Axiom y Grafana Cloud lado a lado — incluyendo precios mensuales, límites del tier gratuito, características técnicas, cuotas de uso (almacenamiento, transferencia, usuarios activos mensuales) y los interfaces de desarrollo disponibles. Todos los datos proceden de la documentación oficial de cada proveedor, no de respuestas generadas por IA.

Axiom es una plataforma de la categoría monitoring — Observability for logs, traces, events — serverless-first, infinite scale. Ofrece 7 tiers de precio: Personal (Free) gratuito, Axiom Cloud desde $25/mes, RBAC Add-on desde $50/mes, Audit Logs Add-on desde $50/mes. Su catálogo en Staxly documenta 15 características y 9 interfazes para desarrolladores.

Grafana Cloud pertenece a la categoría monitoring — Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana. Ofrece 4 tiers de precio: Free gratuito, Self-Hosted (OSS) gratuito, Pro desde $19/mes, Enterprise desde $25000/mes. Su catálogo documenta 16 características y 7 interfazes para desarrolladores.

A continuación encontrarás los tiers de precio completos de ambas plataformas, una matriz de cuotas del tier gratuito (transferencia, almacenamiento, MAU, llamadas a la API y otros límites), el listado completo de características y los interfaces (CLI, SDKs, REST, GraphQL, MCP) disponibles para integrar cada servicio.

¿Necesitas estos datos en tu agente de IA (Claude Code, Cursor, Zed)? Instala gratis el servidor MCP de Staxly y tendrás acceso estructurado a Axiom, Grafana Cloud y más de 130 plataformas para desarrolladores.

Pricing tiers

Axiom

Personal (Free)
No credit card. 500 GB/month ingest, 10 GB-hr compute, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention max.
Free
Axiom Cloud
$25/month minimum platform fee. Volume-based ingest + query credits. Always-free allowances: 1 TB/mo ingest, 100 GB-hr queries, 100 GB storage.
$25/mo
RBAC Add-on
+$50/month for role-based access control.
$50/mo
Audit Logs Add-on
+$50/month for audit logs.
$50/mo
Directory Sync Add-on
+$100/month for SCIM.
$100/mo
SSO Add-on
+$100/month for SAML SSO.
$100/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated cluster option, private connectivity, SLA.
Custom
Axiom website ↗

Grafana Cloud

Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Grafana Cloud website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing personal on Axiom vs free on Grafana Cloud.

MetricAxiomGrafana Cloud
ingest gb month500 GB/month—
query compute gb hr10 GB-hr/month—
retention max days30 days—
storage gb25 GB—

Features

Axiom · 15 features

  • API Tokens — Scoped tokens for ingest or query.
  • APL (query language) — Axiom Processing Language — Kusto-inspired pipes (`|`). Fast + expressive.
  • AWS Lambda Extension — Native extension to ship Lambda logs + traces.
  • Cloudflare Integration — Workers + Pages log drain. Log pull from any Cloudflare zone.
  • Dashboards — Visualizations from APL queries: line/bar/pie/heatmap/table.
  • Datasets — Logical partitions of data. Schema-free; fields auto-indexed.
  • Elastic Bulk API compat — Elasticsearch Bulk API endpoint — drop-in replacement.
  • Field Explorer — Auto-detected field stats, histograms, top-values per dataset.
  • Monitors (alerts) — Threshold + anomaly-based alerting on APL queries. Route to Slack/PagerDuty/emai…
  • OpenTelemetry-native — Ingest OTLP/HTTP + gRPC. No proprietary agent.
  • Saved Queries — Save + share APL queries as starters.
  • Stream (live tail) — Live tail of incoming events with filter bar.
  • Traces — OpenTelemetry-native. Distributed tracing across services.
  • Vercel Integration — One-click: Vercel logs + Web Vitals → Axiom.
  • next-axiom — Next.js logger with automatic correlation + Web Vitals capture.

Grafana Cloud · 16 features

  • Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
  • Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
  • Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
  • Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
  • Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
  • Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
  • Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
  • Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
  • Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
  • Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
  • Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
  • Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
  • Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
  • Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
  • Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.
  • k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.

Developer interfaces

KindAxiomGrafana Cloud
CLIAxiom CLIGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli
SDK@axiomhq/js, axiom-go, axiom-py, axiom-rs, next-axiomFaro Web SDK (RUM)
RESTAxiom REST API, Ingest HTTP endpointGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push API
MCPAxiom MCP—
OTHER—Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP

Key takeaways

  • Both Axiom and Grafana Cloud offer a free tier — Axiom ("Personal (Free)") and Grafana Cloud ("Free") — with no credit card required to start.
  • The entry-level paid plan is $25/month for Axiom (Axiom Cloud) vs. $19/month for Grafana Cloud (Pro).
  • Grafana Cloud has a broader documented feature set (16 features) vs. Axiom (15 features) in Staxly's catalog.
  • Developer integrations differ: only Axiom offers MCP; only Grafana Cloud offers OTHER.
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Axiom and Grafana Cloud may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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