Staxly

Grafana Cloud vs Pusher

Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
vs. Realtime pub/sub WebSocket Channels + programmatic push (Beams)

Grafana Cloud website ↗Pusher website ↗

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
Grafana Cloud website ↗

Pusher

Beams: Sandbox
Free. 1K subscribers.
$0 base (usage-based)
Channels: Sandbox
Free. 100 concurrent conns, 200K msg/day.
$0 base (usage-based)
Beams: Startup
$29/mo. 10K subscribers.
$29/mo
Channels: Startup
$49/mo. 500 concurrent conns, 1M msg/day.
$49/mo
Channels: Pro
$99/mo. 2K concurrent conns, 4M msg/day.
$99/mo
Beams: Pro
$99/mo. 50K subscribers.
$99/mo
Beams: Business
$199/mo. 115K subscribers.
$199/mo
Channels: Business
$299/mo. 5K concurrent, 10M msg/day.
$299/mo
Beams: Premium
$399/mo. 250K subscribers.
$399/mo
Channels: Premium
$499/mo. 10K concurrent, 20M msg/day.
$499/mo
Channels: Growth
$699/mo. 15K concurrent, 40M msg/day.
$699/mo
Channels: Plus
$899/mo. 20K concurrent, 60M msg/day.
$899/mo
Channels: Growth Plus
$1,199/mo. 30K concurrent, 90M msg/day.
$1199/mo
Channels: Enterprise
Custom. 10M+ concurrent, 100B+ msg/day. SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Pusher website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Grafana Cloud vs be-sandbox on Pusher.

MetricGrafana CloudPusher
subscribers—1000 subscribers

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.

Pusher · 11 features

  • Beams — Push notifications for iOS/Android/Web with device interest groups.
  • Beams Authenticated Users — Target users by auth user ID across devices.
  • Channels — WebSocket pub/sub — realtime events, live updates, notifications.
  • Channels Webhooks — Receive server-side notifications of channel activity.
  • Client Events — Publish events from clients directly (triggered from browser).
  • Debug Console — Live channel debugging dashboard.
  • Encrypted Channels — End-to-end encrypted messages.
  • Global Clusters — US, EU, AP-Southeast, etc. Pick nearest region.
  • Presence Channels — Track who is online in a channel.
  • Private Channels — Auth-required channels with server-signed tokens.
  • Stats — Connection / message dashboards.

Developer interfaces

KindGrafana CloudPusher
CLIGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli—
SDKFaro Web SDK (RUM)Pusher Beams Android, Pusher Beams iOS, Pusher Beams Web SDK, pusher-http-go, pusher-http-java, pusher-http-php, pusher-js (client), pusher (Node), pusher (Python), pusher (Ruby), PusherSwift, pusher-websocket-java (Android)
RESTGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push APIBeams Publish API, Pusher HTTP API
OTHERPrometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLPChannels Webhooks, Pusher WebSocket
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Grafana Cloud and Pusher 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.