Staxly

PocketBase vs Grafana Cloud

Open-source backend in a single Go binary
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana

PocketBase (OSS) ↗Grafana Cloud website ↗

Pricing tiers

PocketBase

Self-Hosted
MIT-licensed single binary. Run on any VPS / Docker / bare metal. No usage caps — only limited by your server.
$0 base (usage-based)
PocketBase (OSS) ↗

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 self-hosted on PocketBase vs free on Grafana Cloud.

MetricPocketBaseGrafana Cloud
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

PocketBase · 12 features

  • Access Rules — Record-level access rules (filter expressions) referencing @request and @collect…
  • Admin Dashboard — Built-in web UI for schema + data management.
  • Auth — Email+password, OAuth2 (Google, GitHub, Facebook, Apple, Discord, Microsoft, etc…
  • Backups — Built-in backup/restore with S3 upload option.
  • Built-in Mailer — SMTP integration for verification, password reset, magic link emails.
  • Collections — Schema-defined record types with fields, validations, and record/admin/auth acce…
  • Embedded JS Engine — JavaScript VM (goja) lets you write hooks in JS without recompiling.
  • Extend as Go Library — Embed PocketBase in a larger Go app, add custom routes and events.
  • File Storage — Local filesystem or S3-compatible storage with access rules.
  • Hooks — Server-side Go or JavaScript hooks that run on CRUD events (OnRecordBeforeCreate…
  • Migrations — JS/Go migration scripts applied on startup.
  • Realtime Subscriptions — SSE-based subscriptions to collection changes.

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

KindPocketBaseGrafana Cloud
CLI—Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli
SDKGo API (extend as library), pocketbase (Dart), pocketbase (JS SDK)Faro Web SDK (RUM)
RESTREST APIGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push API
OTHERAdmin Dashboard, Realtime SSEPrometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to PocketBase and Grafana Cloud are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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