Qdrant vs Grafana Cloud
Rust-based vector DB — high performance, OSS, managed cloud
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
Pricing tiers
Qdrant
Free Forever
Single-node 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 4 GB disk. Free cloud inference models.
Free
Standard
Usage-based. Dedicated resources, flexible scaling. 99.5% SLA. Backups + DR. Free inference tokens.
$0 base (usage-based)
Self-Host (OSS)
Apache 2.0 licensed. Run for free.
$0 base (usage-based)
Hybrid Cloud (BYOC)
Run managed cluster on your infra. Data stays in your network.
Custom
Premium
Min spend required. SSO + private VPC links. 99.9% SLA. 24x7 enterprise support.
Custom
Private Cloud
Dedicated + isolated. Custom SLA. Large enterprise.
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 free on Qdrant vs free on Grafana Cloud.
| Metric | Qdrant | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Qdrant · 13 features
- BYOC (Hybrid Cloud) — Managed Qdrant in your cloud account.
- Cloud Inference — Hosted embedding models for free tokens.
- Cluster Monitoring — Prometheus metrics + health.
- Collections — Typed collections with named vectors + payload schema.
- Distributed — Horizontal sharding + Raft replication.
- Hybrid Search — Sparse + dense + keyword in one query.
- Multi-Vector — Multiple vectors per point (text + image, etc.).
- Open Source — Apache 2.0 licensed.
- Payload Filters — Rich filter DSL with indexed fields.
- Quantization — Scalar + product + binary for memory reduction.
- RBAC — API-key scopes + roles.
- Snapshots + Restore — Backup + DR primitives.
- Sparse Vectors — BM25 + SPLADE sparse embeddings natively.
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 | Qdrant | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli |
| SDK | go-client, java-client, qdrant-client (py), qdrant-client (rust), qdrant-dotnet, @qdrant/js-client-rest | Faro Web SDK (RUM) |
| REST | Qdrant REST API | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API |
| MCP | Qdrant MCP | — |
| OTHER | Qdrant gRPC | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Qdrant 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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