Compare Grafana vs. OpenObserve

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. Recognized as a 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Observability Platforms and positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision, Grafana Labs supports over 25M users and 5,000+ customers. Grafana Cloud delivers the full power of Grafana’s open and composable observability stack—without the overhead of managing infrastructure. As a fully managed SaaS offering from Grafana Labs, it unifies metrics, logs, and traces in one place, giving engineering teams real-time visibility into systems and applications. Built around the LGTM Stack—Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics—Grafana Cloud provides a scalable foundation for modern observability. With built-in integrations for Kubernetes, cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, and OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud accelerates time to value while reducing operational complexity. Grafana Cloud also supports OLAP-style analytics through integrations with data warehouses and analytical engines like BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid—enabling multi-dimensional exploration across observability and business data. Teams gain access to powerful features like Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization, incident response workflows, and synthetic monitoring for performance testing—all within a secure, globally distributed platform. Whether you’re modernizing infrastructure, scaling observability, or driving SLO-based performance, Grafana Cloud delivers the insights you need—fast, flexible, and vendor-neutral.

OpenObserve is a robust open-source observability platform designed for managing logs, metrics, and traces, focusing on exceptional performance, scalability, and significantly reduced costs. It enables observability at a petabyte scale by incorporating features like columnar storage data compression and the flexibility of “bring your own bucket” storage options, including local disks and cloud services such as S3, GCS, and Azure Blob. Developed in Rust, it utilizes the DataFusion query engine for direct querying of Parquet files, and it boasts a stateless, horizontally scalable framework that employs caching strategies for both results and disk to ensure rapid performance even during peak loads. By adhering to open standards, including compatibility with OpenTelemetry and vendor-neutral APIs, OpenObserve seamlessly integrates into pre-existing monitoring and logging ecosystems. Its essential components encompass logs, metrics, traces, frontend monitoring, pipelines, alerts, and comprehensive dashboards for visualizations. Ultimately, OpenObserve empowers organizations to achieve efficient and cost-effective observability solutions in their operations.