Staxly

Temporal vs Grafana Cloud

Durable execution platform for mission-critical workflows
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana

Temporal website ↗Grafana Cloud website ↗

Pricing tiers

Temporal

Self-Hosted (OSS)
Free forever. MIT license. Run the Temporal cluster yourself on K8s/Docker.
$0 base (usage-based)
Cloud (usage-based)
Temporal Cloud. Pay per action ($25 per 1M actions base). Active user + storage also billed.
$0 base (usage-based)
Business Plan
Starts ~$100/mo commit. Multi-region, SSO, priority support.
Custom
Enterprise
Custom. HIPAA, PCI, dedicated clusters, enterprise SLA.
Custom
Temporal 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 oss on Temporal vs free on Grafana Cloud.

MetricTemporalGrafana Cloud
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Temporal · 16 features

  • Activities — Retryable units of work.
  • Activity Retries — Declarative retry policies.
  • Child Workflows — Nested workflow composition.
  • Continue-As-New — Close + restart workflow to prune history.
  • Nexus (cross-namespace) — Call workflows across namespaces/teams.
  • Queries — Synchronous read of workflow state.
  • Saga / Compensations — Rollback pattern via compensating activities.
  • Schedules — Cron-like recurring workflows.
  • Self-Host — Deploy cluster on your infra.
  • Signals — Async messages into a running workflow.
  • Timers — Durable sleeps — hours, days, months.
  • Update — Synchronous RPC into workflow with validation.
  • Visibility + Search Attrs — Query workflow state via Elasticsearch/native store.
  • Web UI — Inspect workflow history, events, stack.
  • Workflows — Durable, replayable, long-running functions.
  • Workflow Versioning — Patch workflow code without breaking in-flight runs.

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

KindTemporalGrafana Cloud
CLItemporal CLIGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli
SDKTemporal Go SDK, temporalio (Python), @temporalio (TypeScript), Temporal Java SDK, Temporal .NET SDK, Temporal PHP SDKFaro Web SDK (RUM)
REST—Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API
OTHERTemporal gRPC API, Temporal Web UIPrometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Temporal 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.

Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.