Compare Datadog and Grafana Cloud free tiers side by side. Grafana Cloud's free tier is dramatically more generous than Datadog's: 10K metrics with 14-day retention vs Datadog's 5 hosts with 1-day retention.
Side-by-side comparison of free tiers, pricing changes, and stability. Catalogue dates here run to 2026-11-12.
Quick Verdict: Grafana Cloud's free tier is dramatically more generous than Datadog's: 10K metrics with 14-day retention vs Datadog's 5 hosts with 1-day retention. For teams that want full-stack observability without vendor lock-in, Grafana Cloud is the clear winner on free tier value.
Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community support. 10k metric series, 50 GB logs, and 50 GB traces are included. Pro costs $19 a month plus usage, includes 10k active series and 50 GB each of logs and traces, and bills usage above them. Pro keeps metrics for 13 months and logs, traces, profiles and k6 tests for 30 days.
Free and Trial accounts opened on or after 2026-04-20 can only send email alerts and reports to users in their own Grafana instance. Other email recipients are rejected. Cloud Alertmanager is unavailable; native Grafana Alertmanager is used. Webhooks and other alert integrations are unaffected. Upgrading lifts the email limit. Older free accounts are unaffected. (From status.grafana.com/incidents/xg2h8ht1d44n, read 2026-11-02.)
Free tier generosity: Grafana Cloud offers 10K metric series, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces with 14-day retention. Datadog offers 5 hosts with 1-day retention — a 14x retention difference.
Lock-in: Grafana Cloud is built on open standards (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo). Datadog uses proprietary agents and query languages, making migration painful.
Users: Grafana Cloud allows 3 users on the free plan. Datadog has no explicit user limit on free tier.
Ease of use: Datadog has arguably better out-of-the-box dashboards and integrations. Grafana requires more initial configuration but offers more flexibility.
Pricing Change History
Datadog
No recorded pricing changes for Datadog.
Grafana Cloud
reducedeffective 2026-04-20medium impact
On 2026-04-20, Grafana Cloud restricted new Free and Trial accounts. Email alerts and reports can only go to users of their own Grafana instance; other recipients are rejected. Cloud Alertmanager is unavailable. Other alert integrations such as webhooks are unaffected. Accounts opened before April 20 are unaffected. Grafana stated this safeguarded the platform against unauthorized emails. Source ↗
reducedeffective 2026-04-07low impact
On 2026-04-07, Grafana Cloud introduced a hard limit of 1,000 dashboards and 1,000 folders per free tier stack. Stacks already above these limits kept their resources. Paid stacks received a soft limit that support could raise. Source ↗
Our Recommendation
Choose Grafana Cloud if you want more free monitoring headroom than Datadog's 5 hosts and 1-day retention, prefer open standards, or want to avoid vendor lock-in.
Choose Datadog if you prioritize out-of-the-box integrations and polished UX — but only if you can justify the cost when you outgrow the very limited free tier.
Grafana Cloud's free tier is dramatically more generous than Datadog's: 10K metrics with 14-day retention vs Datadog's 5 hosts with 1-day retention. For teams that want full-stack observability without vendor lock-in, Grafana Cloud is the clear winner on free tier value.
What is Datadog's free tier?
Datadog offers a Free plan: Infrastructure monitoring free for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention
What is Grafana Cloud's free tier?
Grafana Cloud offers a Free plan: Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community support. 10k metric series, 50 GB logs, and 50 GB traces are included. Pro costs $19 a month...
Should I choose Datadog or Grafana Cloud?
Choose Grafana Cloud if you want more free monitoring headroom than Datadog's 5 hosts and 1-day retention, prefer open standards, or want to avoid vendor lock-in. Choose Datadog if you prioritize out-of-the-box integrations and polished UX — but only if you can justify the cost when you outgrow the very limited free tier.