Compare Grafana and Cube on pricing, features, platforms, and ratings — both Business Intelligence tools, Freemium (Open Source plus Usage-based Cloud) vs…
At a Glance
Grafana
Cube
Primary category
Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence
Rating
Not documented
Not documented
Pricing model
Freemium (Open Source plus Usage-based Cloud)
Freemium
Starting price
Free (self-hosted OSS or Grafana Cloud free tier)
Free
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Free trial
Not documented
Not documented
Platforms
Web
Not documented
Team collaboration
Not documented
Not documented
AI features
Yes
Yes
Public API
Yes
Yes
Pricing Compared
Starting price reflects the lowest paid tier, not the full cost for every team size or usage level.
Grafana
Open Source (Self-Hosted) — Free N/A
Cloud Free — Free Monthly
Cloud Pro — From $19/month plus usage Monthly
Cloud Advanced — From $55/month Monthly
Enterprise — Custom (from around $25,000/year) Annual
Free and open source core with no vendor lock-in to a single data store
Connects to virtually any metrics, logs or trace data source in one interface
Highly customizable dashboards backed by a large community plugin ecosystem
Usage-based Cloud pricing can be more cost-effective at scale than closed observability suites
Cons
Usage-based Cloud pricing can become unpredictable for high-cardinality metrics
Self-hosting the full LGTM stack requires meaningful operational expertise
Some advanced features like SSO and premium connectors require Enterprise licensing
PromQL, LogQL and TraceQL have a learning curve for newcomers
Cube
Pros
Open-source core with a large, active GitHub community
Headless architecture avoids vendor lock-in to a single BI front end
Single governed metric definitions reduce inconsistent numbers across tools
Increasingly positioned for AI/agentic use cases, not just traditional dashboards
Cons
Usage-based Cube Compute Unit billing can make costs less predictable than flat per-seat pricing
Requires engineering effort to define and maintain the semantic data model
Premium tier requires a $10,000 annual consumption commitment
Enterprise features like BYOC and custom LLM support require a custom quote
Use Cases
Grafana
Infrastructure and Kubernetes Monitoring — Visualize cluster health, resource usage and application metrics collected by Prometheus and other exporters.
Business and Executive Reporting Dashboards — Combine data from SQL databases, APIs and cloud services into shareable business dashboards.
IoT and Sensor Data Visualization — Monitor time-series data streaming from industrial sensors, devices and edge deployments.
Cube
Embedded analytics in SaaS products — Software companies use Cube to power in-app dashboards and reporting for their own customers without duplicating metric logic.
Consistent enterprise metrics — Data platform teams centralize metric definitions in Cube so Tableau, Power BI, and internal tools all report the same numbers.
AI agent data access — Organizations connect AI copilots and chat assistants to Cube's semantic layer so they answer questions using governed, trustworthy metrics.