Trigger.dev vs Grafana Cloud
Open-source background jobs with no timeouts and full observability
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
Pricing tiers
Trigger.dev
Free
$0. 5K runs/mo. 1 concurrent run. 1 team member. 7-day log retention.
Free
Self-Host (OSS)
Free. Apache-2.0 license. Docker Compose + Postgres + Redis.
$0 base (usage-based)
Hobby
$10/mo. 50K runs/mo. 25 concurrent. Unlimited queue time.
$10/mo
Pro
$50/mo (starts at — usage scales). 250K runs/mo baseline. 100 concurrent. Priority.
$50/mo
Enterprise
Custom. HIPAA, SSO, dedicated clusters, on-prem.
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 Trigger.dev vs free on Grafana Cloud.
| Metric | Trigger.dev | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Trigger.dev · 13 features
- Batch Trigger — Trigger many runs at once with limits.
- Environment Variables — Manage secrets in dashboard.
- Idempotency Keys — Prevent duplicate runs.
- Machine Sizing — Pick CPU/RAM per task.
- Queues + Concurrency — Named queues for controlled throughput.
- Realtime + React Hooks — Subscribe to run progress from client.
- Retries — Exponential + custom strategies.
- Schedules — Cron-triggered runs.
- Self-Hosting — Run locally or on your infra.
- Subtasks + triggerAndWait — Compose tasks by triggering children.
- Task Metadata — Attach arbitrary metadata to runs.
- Tasks — Define long-running TS tasks.
- wait.for / wait.until — Durable waits — minutes, hours, days.
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 | Trigger.dev | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | trigger.dev CLI | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli |
| SDK | @trigger.dev/react-hooks, @trigger.dev/sdk | Faro Web SDK (RUM) |
| REST | Trigger.dev REST API | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API |
| OTHER | Trigger.dev Dashboard, Trigger.dev Webhooks | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Trigger.dev 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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