Coralogix vs Grafana Cloud: Pricing, Features and More

While Grafana is one of the better known names in the industry, Coralogix offers a full-stack observability platform. Despite the popularity of the Grafana brand, the cloud based solution lacks in some key areas. 

This article will go over the differences between Coralogix and Grafana Cloud, from features, customer support, pricing and more. 

Coralogix vs Grafana Cloud

Cost optimization

Grafana Cloud offers a series of techniques, such as lowering metric sampling rate to help its customers manage the cost of their observability solution. However, Grafana has not built out any tooling specifically designed to enable cost optimization.

On the other hand, Coralogix has built the most advanced cost optimization toolkit in the observability market, the TCO Optimizer. The TCO Optimizer works by allocating different logs and traces, from either specific applications, severities or even traces to particular endpoints, to three different use cases.

Each use case comes with a significant cost saving. The proper use of the TCO Optimizer regularly drives cost savings of between 40 and 70%. 

Cost breakdown

For the sake of simplicity, we will assume a user with the following requirements:

• 1TB Logs Ingested Per Month
• There are 20 active users of the platform at any one time.
• Requires 24/7 support

Coralogix

For Coralogix, the number of active users is irrelevant, because Coralogix does not charge per user and only by data. Additionally, when users are set up on our platform, we aim to create a 50-40-10 split, using our TCO Optimizer. This enables enormous cost savings.

Total Costs: $18 Compliance Logs + $193 Monitoring Logs + $602 Frequent Search Logs = $813 / month

Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud similarly charged by GB ingested for logs, but also charges an additional fee for enterprise support and users. 

Data Costs: 1TB Logs * $0.50 = $500 / month

Enterprise Support: $299 / month

Per User Cost: 5 free users + 15 * $55 = $825

Total Costs: $500 + $299 + $825 = $1624 / month

Pricing model 

Grafana Cloud offers a comprehensive pricing model, but it suffers from many of the issues that impact much of the observability market. Their pricing model is tiered and based on a large number of variables, including number of metric series, number of users, testing volume, data ingestion and more. This makes for poor transparency. 

In comparison, Coralogix offers the simplest pricing model on the market, free from tiering, user limits, or complex pricing calculations. Coralogix customers enjoy unlimited active users, unlimited dashboards, alarms and more, because their costs are calculated in only one way – data volume.

This makes Coralogix more predictable and transparent, without deterring or discouraging extensive use of the Coralogix platform.

Support packages

Grafana Cloud offers a tiered solution. For example, if a company wishes to access 24/7 support, they need to buy into their enterprise license. This type of support package comes with an additional base cost of $299 / month, before any usage costs are added in. Support also comes with a two-hour SLA for response time. 

Coralogix offers 24/7 support as standard, and delivers a 15-second median response time, coupled with a 43-minute median resolution time. Thus, Coralogix is solving problems for customers faster than Grafana Cloud is acknowledging them. 

Prebuilt dashboards and powerful insights 

Grafana Cloud is essentially an empty Grafana instance, which means there isn’t any prebuilt functionality in place. This delays the time to value for the product, because in addition to integrating with the solution, Grafana Cloud customers must then construct dashboards, or go hunting on the internet for an existing solution.

Coralogix comes fitted with Kubernetes, Serverless, Cloud Infrastructure monitoring and more, with absolutely 0 time to value. Simply ingesting data is enough to activate these visualizations. Our dashboards come packed with more than can be expected from a simple Grafana dashboard, including geographical visualizations to aid multi-region node balancing in Kubernetes clusters, or deep integrations with other views, such as the Tracing interface. 

Coupled with custom dashboards, Coralogix offers all of the flexibility of a bespoke solution, with the instant time-to-value of a premade dashboard. 

The risk of Grafana Loki

Grafana Loki, which is the logging solution built into Grafana Cloud, is a powerful solution, but has been shown to come with some stability and performance issues when it comes to high cardinality data. 

And Grafana Loki does not index all of the data in a given log, only the metadata. While this means that specific queries are fast and scalable, it also greatly diminishes the flexibility of the Grafana Loki solution.

Logs need to be accessed in many different ways, and should not be hindered by unpredictable or unreliable query performance. Therefore Coralogix fully indexes its Frequent Search logs, but offers customers the option to optimize their data using the Coralogix TCO Optimizer. 

This enables scalability, by only fully indexing the important data, with the performance and reliability of a fully featured index. 

Summary 

While Grafana cloud enjoys some great features, it falls short on feature availability, cost optimization, and out of the box analytics, creating potential barriers to ROI and general usability of the software.

With a simple pricing model and a rich feature set, Coralogix is a clear choice for every use case, whether the dataset is small or, more frequently, for large data volumes.