Staxly

Plausible Analytics vs Grafana Cloud

Privacy-first web analytics — cookieless, no GDPR/CCPA nightmare
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana

Plausible AnalyticsGrafana Cloud website

Pricing tiers

Plausible Analytics

Self-Hosted (CE)
Community Edition — AGPL-licensed, run on your own infra.
$0 base (usage-based)
Starter
$9/month. 1 site. Basic dashboard, goals, 3-year data retention.
$9/mo
Growth
$14/month. 3 sites + 3 team members. Shared dashboards + team mgmt.
$14/mo
Business
$19/month. 10 sites + 10 members. Custom properties, API access, funnels, 5-year retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SSO, managed proxy, priority support.
Custom
Plausible Analytics

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 starter on Plausible Analytics vs free on Grafana Cloud.

MetricPlausible AnalyticsGrafana Cloud
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Plausible Analytics · 16 features

  • 404 Error TrackingAuto-detect 404 pages.
  • Custom PropertiesAttach arbitrary properties to events (Business+).
  • Email/Slack ReportsWeekly + monthly reports to email/Slack.
  • File Download TrackingTrack PDF/DOC/ZIP downloads.
  • FunnelsMulti-step funnel analysis (Business+).
  • Goals & ConversionsTrack custom events + pageview-based goals.
  • Import from Google AnalyticsImport historical GA data via script.
  • Managed Proxy (Ent)Proxy plausible.io through your domain to bypass ad-blockers.
  • Outbound Link TrackingOne-line extension to track outbound clicks.
  • Revenue GoalsTrack $ amounts per goal. Great for e-commerce.
  • Self-HostingRun via Docker. AGPL Community Edition.
  • Shared DashboardsPublic or password-protected share links.
  • Single-page DashboardAll your metrics on one page: visitors, pageviews, sources, devices, countries,
  • Stats APIPull data into your own tools via REST. Business+.
  • Team ManagementOwners, admins, viewers per site.
  • UTM CampaignsTrack utm_source/medium/campaign automatically.

Grafana Cloud · 16 features

  • Alloy (OTel agent)Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
  • Application PlatformInfrastructure + 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 IncidentIncident management with Slack-native flows.
  • Grafana OnCallOn-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
  • Grafana SLOService 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 OptionFull OSS stack deployable in your infra.
  • Tempo (traces)High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
  • Unified AlertingGrafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.

Developer interfaces

KindPlausible AnalyticsGrafana Cloud
CLIGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli
SDK@nuxtjs/plausible + plugins, plausible-tracker (npm)Faro Web SDK (RUM)
RESTEvents API, Plausible Stats API, Sites Management APIGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push API
OTHERTracker Script (<script>)Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Plausible Analytics and Grafana Cloud are plain references to their official websites. 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.