Splunk vs. Grafana Cloud

Predictable costs.  Portable telemetry. Faster fixes.

Choose Grafana Cloud to take control of your logging costs and use your metrics, logs, traces, and profiles together for faster AI-powered incident resolution.

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Why teams choose Grafana Cloud over Splunk

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform and a cost-effective alternative to Splunk for log management and AI-powered full-stack observability. Unlike Splunk's ingest-based pricing and proprietary SPL query language, Grafana Cloud uses consumption-based pricing with Adaptive Telemetry — which can cut costs by 50% or more — built on open standards including OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

Optimize costs by keeping only the telemetry worth your attention

Rather than paying security prices for observability logs, save 50% or more on telemetry cost by intelligently aggregating and sampling metrics, logs, traces, and profiles.

“We make heavy use of Adaptive Metrics and Adaptive Logs across the board. We've seen that drive our costs significantly down, which is a big thing when it comes to our customers.”
Owen Bower Adams
Head of Platform Engineering

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Avoid lock-in with native OTel telemetry from collection to query

Rather than converting OTel into a proprietary format, future-proof your observability strategy with a platform natively built on open source software and open standards like Open Telemetry and Prometheus, from collection to query.

“The reason we chose Grafana Labs is because they align with our strategy — they natively support OpenTelemetry, and we want to work with somebody who built a product born in the cloud, for the cloud.”
Murugesan Ramaiah
Solutions Architect

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Use metrics, logs, traces, and profiles together seamlessly

Rather than switching between split Logs and Observability offerings, use all of your telemetry together to save your team time during incidents.

“We can go all the way down and see the exact SQL calls that we call into the database… It’s more data than we ever had… and it makes it extremely simple to find exactly how and when something breaks.”
Zachary Sistrunk
Software Developer III

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See and act on all your data without migrating it

Rather than choosing between a costly migration and gaps in your visibility, act on all your signals in one place by connecting directly to hundreds of data sources without migrating.

Connect to your Splunk data directly from Grafana first, test and compare dashboards, and then migrate agents for a safe cutover.

“It's not only about taking the integration path because with Grafana, you can use integrations for different products in that Big Tent, but you are also able to use more than 100 data sources inside Grafana Cloud. Open your minds and think about what could we do with all the information stored in those data sources?”
Jan Ove Steppat
Infrastructure Architect Container/Observability

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Comparing Grafana Cloud vs. Splunk

Capabilities
Ideal use case	Improving the performance and reliability of apps and infrastructure in a complex, distributed system.	Complex log analytics dealing with large amounts of data over long time ranges (days, months), like security investigation or analyzing business transaction data.
Optimize your observability costs	Grafana Cloud Adaptive telemetry automatically identifies unused metrics, labels, and specific patterns for sampling logs, traces, and profiles, to keep only telemetry worth your attention. This can save 50%+ on telemetry cost. Learn more	Billing is primarily based on data ingest volume, which can lead to high and unpredictable costs as telemetry grows. Lacks automatic features to proactively optimize data volume.
Avoid lock-in with OpenTelemetry	Natively supports OpenTelemetry (OTLP) and open source collectors, formats, and query languages, ensuring pipelines and tooling remain portable and vendor-agnostic. Learn more	While Splunk can accept OTel data, querying and retention within the core platform still rely on a proprietary agent, format, and the Search Processing Language (SPL).
Resolve incidents across telemetry signals	Get a cohesive, unified view of the three pillars (metrics, logs, and traces) in a single platform, eliminating context-switching.	Offers comprehensive observability, but often requires stitching together components from a suite of products, which can lead to tool sprawl.
Explore, visualize, and alert on your data	Powerful and flexible operational dashboards, with a large library of visualization options. Learn more	Requires data migration and proficiency in the proprietary Search Processing Language (SPL) for all querying, dashboard creation, and alerting.
See and act on data from across your organization	Connect to 150+ data sources (databases, monitoring tools, workflow and SaaS tools) and correlate signals without migrating data Learn more	Large app ecosystem, but optimized for data ingested into the Splunk platform, increasing costs and lock-in.
Use AI to onboard and to predict, detect, and resolve issues faster	Grafana Assistant and Investigations helps users onboard quickly, explore data without writing queries, generate entire dashboards, investigate incidents and even submit code fixes from within Grafana. Learn more	Use the Splunk Assistant to learn SPL and use AIOps features for anomaly detection and field value prediction.

Grafana Labs: A Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms

Gartner evaluated 20 vendors based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, and Grafana Labs was positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.

Graph showing Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms.

^{Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms, By Gregg Siegfried, Matt Crossley, Padraig Byrne, Andre Bridges, Martin Caren, 7 July 2025}

^{Gartner and Magic Quadrant are a trademark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.}

^{Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}

^{This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Grafana Labs.}