7di vs Grafana: a lighter alternative to Grafana Cloud

Grafana is a powerful open-source visualization platform used by engineering teams to build dashboards from metrics, logs, and traces. Grafana Cloud adds managed hosting, alerting, synthetic monitoring, and more. It is excellent for teams running instrumented infrastructure. It is overkill for everyone else.

Feature comparison

What Grafana is built for

Grafana connects to data sources: Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and dozens of plugins for databases and third-party services. Once connected, it renders charts and dashboards from that data using PromQL or LogQL query languages. Grafana Cloud adds managed hosting so you do not need to run Grafana yourself.

It is designed for DevOps and SRE teams with instrumented applications generating time-series metrics at high volume. The canonical setup involves deploying a metrics agent (Grafana Agent or Prometheus) to each host, configuring scrape targets, and writing PromQL queries to build dashboards. This process works well at scale and is the right choice when you already have that infrastructure.

Grafana Cloud pricing (2026)

Grafana's free tier is defined in metric series and data volume, not in checks. To compare fairly with 7di, the table below also shows what 7di's free 2,000 credits get you in equivalent uptime checks per month.

Grafana's free tier does not express limits in checks. It assumes you are ingesting metrics from running services. If you are not running a metrics agent, the free tier offers nothing useful.

7di pricing in the same unit

7di charges per check. Every widget type has a fixed credit cost per run. The free plan gives you 2,000 credits per month. Here is what that gets you:

A typical small setup: 5 uptime widgets at 5-minute intervals uses 2,160 credits per month. That is the entire free plan. Add a 1-hour Smart alert and a daily Live lookup and you stay well within 2,000 credits. Bump to Pro ($12/mo) for 8,000 credits and run 20 uptime monitors at 5-minute intervals, 10 Smart alerts at 1-hour intervals, and 5 Live lookups at 6-hour intervals with credits to spare.

Where 7di is a better fit than Grafana

Grafana requires you to instrument your application, run an agent, and configure data sources before you can build a single chart. If your data does not come from Prometheus, Loki, or one of Grafana's supported data source plugins, you cannot display it. There is no way to ask Grafana "what is the current price of a Big Mac in London" or "alert me when the US passport wait time exceeds 12 weeks." Those data points do not have metrics endpoints.

7di requires no instrumentation. Add a widget, fill in a URL or a question, and the data appears. The Domain / uptime widget monitors any URL. The Custom JS widget fetches any API. The Live lookup widget answers any question using web search. None of these require a running agent or a configured data source.

Grafana alerts are written in PromQL or LogQL. Describing an alert condition in either language requires knowing the query language and having the right metrics instrumented. A Smart alert in 7di is a sentence: "My Vercel bandwidth usage is above 80% of the monthly limit." No query language, no data source required.

Grafana panels can be embedded publicly in some configurations, but it requires Grafana to be set up with anonymous access or authentication tokens, and each panel needs individual configuration. 7di widgets embed on any website with a single iframe and no authentication setup. See Embedding.

Where Grafana is the right choice

If you run production infrastructure with Prometheus metrics, if your team already knows PromQL, or if you need deep integration with traces and logs from instrumented services, Grafana is the right tool. It handles metric cardinality, alert routing, on-call schedules, and enterprise access controls at a level 7di does not try to match.

Grafana is also open-source and self-hostable for free. If you have the infrastructure to run it, the cost is zero beyond hosting. 7di is a hosted service with no self-hosted option on the standard plans.