Staxly

Novu vs Grafana Cloud

Open-source notification infrastructure — workflows across email, SMS, push, chat, in-app
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana

Novu website ↗Grafana Cloud website ↗

Pricing tiers

Novu

Free
10K workflow runs/mo. All channels. 20 workflows, 2 environments, 3 team members, 24h retention.
Free
Self-hosted (OSS)
Open source (MIT). Run locally or on own infrastructure. No usage limits.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
From $30/mo. 30K+ runs, 7-day retention, branding removal, advanced email editor.
$30/mo
Team
From $250/mo. 250K+ runs, 10 envs, 90-day retention, RBAC, 600 RPS.
$250/mo
Enterprise
Custom. 10M+ runs, HIPAA BAA, SSO/OIDC, data residency (SG/UK/AU/JP/KR), self-hosted/VPC.
Custom
Novu 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 free on Novu vs free on Grafana Cloud.

MetricNovuGrafana Cloud
retention1 days—
workflow runs monthly10000 runs/mo—
workflows20 workflows—

Features

Novu · 15 features

  • Activity Feed — Message-by-message delivery timeline.
  • Chat — Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Mattermost, WhatsApp, WeChat.
  • Email — SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun, AWS SES, Resend, SMTP, Plunk, Mailjet, Sparkpost, M…
  • Inbox — React/Next/Vue/Angular in-app Inbox component.
  • Layouts — Reusable email layouts with template nesting.
  • Multi-tenancy — Per-tenant branding, templates, preferences.
  • Novu Framework — Code-first workflow DSL (TypeScript) colocated with app code.
  • Preferences — Per-subscriber + global notification preferences.
  • Push — APNs, FCM, Expo, OneSignal, Pushpad, Pusher.
  • Self-hosting — Docker Compose / Kubernetes deployment of full stack.
  • SMS — Twilio, MessageBird, Plivo, Nexmo, Termii, Sendchamp, Africa's Talking, Kannel, …
  • Subscribers — Subscriber profiles with channels, preferences, topics.
  • Topics — Pub/sub style subscribe many users to a topic.
  • Translations — i18n support for templates.
  • Workflows — Code-first or visual notification workflows with steps, branches, delays.

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

KindNovuGrafana Cloud
CLINovu CLIGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli
SDKgo-novu, @novu/api, @novu/framework, novu-java, novu-kotlin, novu-php, novu (Python), @novu/react (Inbox), novu-rubyFaro Web SDK (RUM)
RESTNovu REST APIGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push API
OTHEROutbound Webhooks, Self-hosted (Docker)Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Novu 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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