Grafana Cloud vs Clerk
Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
vs. User management and authentication as a service
Pricing tiers
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
Clerk
Free
50k MAU included. No SSO/SAML. Perfect for side projects and early prototypes.
Free
Pro
$25/mo (or $20/mo annual). 50k MAU, $0.02 each after. 1 enterprise SSO connection per app. Webhooks, JWT templates, custom session duration.
$25/mo
Business
$300/mo (or $250/mo annual). Advanced organizations, enhanced support, additional enterprise features.
$300/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume MAU discounts, SLA, workspace-wide SAML SSO, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Grafana Cloud vs hobby on Clerk.
| Metric | Grafana Cloud | Clerk |
|---|---|---|
| mao | — | 100 orgs/month |
| mau | — | 50000 users/month |
| sso connections | — | 0 connections |
Features
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.
Clerk · 15 features
- Account Portal — Hosted sign-in/user profile pages at accounts.yourapp.com — zero UI code, fully …
- Bot Protection — Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA integrated into sign-up.
- Clerk Billing — Built-in Stripe-powered billing: subscriptions, plans, proration — ties directly…
- Enterprise SSO (SAML/OIDC) — SAML and OIDC for enterprise customers. Per-domain connection. Pro+ (1 included)…
- Impersonation — Act as a user from dashboard to debug. Logged.
- JWT Templates — Custom JWT issuance for third-party backends (Supabase, Hasura, Firebase, Convex…
- Machine Tokens (M2M) — API keys and machine tokens for service-to-service auth in addition to user sess…
- Multi-Factor Auth — TOTP (authenticator apps), SMS OTP, backup codes. Forced or optional per user.
- Organizations (B2B) — Multi-tenant orgs with roles, permissions, invitations, domain allowlist, and pe…
- Passkeys (WebAuthn) — Passwordless passkey sign-in with per-device biometrics.
- Prebuilt Components — Drop-in React components: <SignIn/>, <SignUp/>, <UserButton/>, <OrganizationSwit…
- Sessions — Server-side session tokens. Sliding expiration by default; configurable absolute…
- User Management — Full user CRUD, metadata (public/private/unsafe), email/phone verification, ban/…
- Waitlist Mode — Collect sign-ups before opening the app. Approve waitlist entries to activate ac…
- Webhooks — Events: user.created/updated/deleted, session.created, organization.* — delivere…
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Grafana Cloud | Clerk |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli | — |
| SDK | Faro Web SDK (RUM) | @clerk/astro, @clerk/backend / @clerk/clerk-sdk-node, @clerk/chrome-extension, @clerk/clerk-expo, @clerk/clerk-js (vanilla), @clerk/clerk-react, @clerk/clerk-react-native, @clerk/nextjs, @clerk/nuxt, @clerk/remix, clerk-sdk-go, clerk-sdk-python, clerk-sdk-ruby, @clerk/tanstack-start, @clerk/vue |
| REST | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API | Backend REST API, Frontend API |
| MCP | — | Clerk MCP |
| OTHER | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP | Webhooks (Svix) |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Grafana Cloud and Clerk 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.
Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.