Cloudways vs Grafana Cloud
Managed cloud hosting across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
Pricing tiers
Cloudways
Autonomous — Free Trial
3-day free trial. 1 server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
Free
Flexible — DO Micro
DigitalOcean-backed. 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth. Starting tier.
$11/mo
Flexible — DO Medium
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB, 5 TB bandwidth.
$88/mo
Autonomous — Growth
WordPress-optimized autoscaling. 1 baseline server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
$100/mo
Autonomous — Scale
2 baseline servers, 50 GB disk, 250 GB bandwidth.
$200/mo
Flexible — DO 8XL
24 vCPU, 128 GB RAM, 2.56 TB storage, 11 TB bandwidth.
$342/mo
Autonomous — Plus
3 baseline servers, 100 GB disk, 1 TB bandwidth.
$400/mo
Enterprise
Custom autoscale, volume pricing.
Custom
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
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing auto-free-trial on Cloudways vs free on Grafana Cloud.
| Metric | Cloudways | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Cloudways · 17 features
- Autonomous (WordPress) — Fully managed WordPress with autoscaling.
- Backups — Automated daily + on-demand. Retention configurable.
- Bot Protection — Cloudflare Enterprise bot filtering add-on.
- Bot Scaler — Autonomous: auto-scale based on traffic patterns.
- Breeze (WP cache plugin) — In-house WordPress caching plugin.
- CloudwaysCDN — Built-in CDN add-on (StackPath-backed).
- Flexible Plans — BYO-sized servers on any of 5 providers. Full control over stack.
- Free Let's Encrypt SSL — 1-click cert install + auto-renewal.
- Free Migration — 1 free app migration per plan. Cloudways team moves your site.
- Horizontal Scaling — Auto-scale app servers (Autonomous plans).
- Malware Protection — Add-on ($4/app/month). Scan + clean.
- Object Cache Pro — Included on certain plans. Redis-backed object cache for WP.
- SafeUpdates — Automated WordPress plugin/theme updates with rollback.
- Staging Environments — 1-click staging clones with push-to-live.
- Team Collaboration — Invite team members with granular role permissions.
- Thunderstack (Optimized) — Apache + Nginx + Varnish + Redis + Memcached preconfigured for speed.
- Vertical Scaling — Resize server specs without migration.
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 in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
- 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 (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
- k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.
- 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.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Cloudways | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli |
| SDK | — | Faro Web SDK (RUM) |
| REST | Cloudways API | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API |
| OTHER | Cloudways Platform (web UI), Server SSH Access, SFTP | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP |
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