Pusher vs Grafana Cloud
Realtime pub/sub WebSocket Channels + programmatic push (Beams)
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
Pricing tiers
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
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
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing be-sandbox on Pusher vs free on Grafana Cloud.
| Metric | Pusher | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| subscribers | 1000 subscribers | — |
Features
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.
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
| Kind | Pusher | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli |
| SDK | 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) | Faro Web SDK (RUM) |
| REST | Beams Publish API, Pusher HTTP API | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API |
| OTHER | Channels Webhooks, Pusher WebSocket | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Pusher 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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