Vigil vs Grafana Cloud
Updated · prices checked September 2026
Grafana Cloud is the most flexible observability stack here, with a free tier that covers a lot of metrics and logs. It is a toolkit: you build the dashboards, alert rules and synthetic checks, and pay per series, GB, host-hour and execution. Vigil gives a small team uptime, cron, servers, logs, errors and private status pages ready to use from $19/month flat, with far less flexibility.
Grafana Cloud pricing September 2026
- Free: 10k metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles (14-day retention), 100k synthetic API and 10k browser executions, 3 Grafana users, 3 IRM users.
- Pro: $19/month platform fee plus usage. Metrics $6.50 per 1k series; logs, traces and profiles $0.05/GB process, $0.40/GB write, $0.10/GB retain; Kubernetes $0.01 per host-hour; application observability $0.025 per host-hour; frontend $0.75 per 1k sessions.
- Synthetics on Pro: API checks $5 per 10k executions, browser checks $50 per 10k. Users $8 per active user; IRM $20 per active IRM user.
- Enterprise: from $25,000/year.
Source: as of September 2026, from grafana.com/pricing. Vendors change prices; the Grafana Cloud site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Grafana Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) | ✓ Synthetic API and browser checks from many probes; 100k API executions free, then $5 per 10k |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✓ Grafana Alloy / Prometheus metrics; 10k series free, $6.50 per 1k after |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✓ Loki: 50 GB free, then per-GB process, write and retain charges |
| APM / traces | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling | ✓ Tempo traces and application observability, $0.025 per host-hour |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✓ Kubernetes monitoring, $0.01 per host-hour after the free allowance |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business | ✓ Frontend observability, 50k sessions free then $0.75 per 1k |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on every paid plan. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ✕ No customer status page product; dashboards can be shared publicly |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ~ 3 users free; $8 per active user on Pro |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account | ✓ Grafana Alerting and IRM with on-call, escalation, Slack, Teams, Telegram, email, webhooks; IRM $20 per user after 3 |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✓ The open-source Grafana stack can be self-hosted (you operate it) |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ~ Grafana Assistant, 3 AI users free then $20 per user |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) | 3 hosts usually fit the free metrics and logs; 50 API checks every minute is about 2.16M executions, roughly $1,050/month on Pro (about $185 at 5-minute intervals); 5 users add $16 |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Grafana Cloud does well
- Grafana dashboards are the industry standard, and Prometheus, Loki and Tempo are open-source building blocks you can also run yourself.
- A genuinely large free tier: 10k series and 50 GB of logs cover a small estate.
- Deep Kubernetes, application and frontend observability, k6 load testing and IRM (on-call) in one account.
Where Vigil is ahead
Limits of Grafana Cloud that Vigil does not have:
- Many meters: series, GB processed, written and retained, host-hours, executions, users. A small team needs someone to own dashboards and costs.
- Synthetic checks are billed per execution: 50 API checks every minute is about 2.2 million executions a month.
- No hosted customer status page product with subscribers.
When to pick Grafana Cloud instead
Pick Grafana Cloud if you use Prometheus and want its query language and dashboards, if you need custom visualisation across many data sources, if the free tier covers you, or if you want an open-source stack you can also run yourself.
What Vigil does not do
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Grafana Cloud to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Grafana Cloud monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Can Vigil send alerts from Grafana?
Yes. Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Grafana and Alertmanager webhooks, so Grafana alerts can raise Vigil incidents, page on-call and show on a status page.
Does Vigil speak Prometheus or OpenTelemetry?
Vigil accepts OpenTelemetry traces, metrics and logs over OTLP (2M spans a day on Pro) and a limited number of Prometheus series per plan. It is not a Prometheus-compatible query backend and has no PromQL dashboards.
How much do 50 one-minute uptime checks cost on each?
Vigil: included in Starter ($19/month). Grafana Cloud: about 2.16 million executions a month, 100k free, then $5 per 10k, so roughly $1,030 plus the $19 platform fee.
Is Vigil's free tier as big?
No. Grafana's free tier (10k series, 50 GB logs) is larger for raw telemetry. Vigil Free is 20 monitors, 1 server, 10k log lines, a private status page and 3 team members, all set up for you.
Try Vigil next to Grafana Cloud
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
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