Grafana vs n8n

Grafana

Open-source dashboards for metrics, logs, and traces

Grafana is the de facto open-source dashboarding layer for operational data: it queries metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from dozens of backends and renders them in one place, and Grafana Cloud packages that with hosted storage on a free tier that is generous enough to run a small production system on. Grafana's defining property is that it does not own your data. It is a visualisation and alerting layer that connects to Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, and many more, which is why it turns up in nearly every observability stack regardless of what else is in it. That neutrality is the reason it became a standard. Grafana Cloud has three tiers. Free costs nothing and includes all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, community support only, and 14-day retention across metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6 tests. The free allocations are concrete: 10,000 active metric series per month, 50GB combined ingestion for logs, traces, and profiles, 2,232 host hours plus 37,944 container hours of Kubernetes monitoring, 3 active Grafana users per month, and 50,000 frontend observability sessions per month. Pro starts at $19/month plus usage, billing pay-as-you-go above the free allocations, and adds 8x5 email support with far longer retention: 13 months for metrics and 30 days for logs, traces, profiles, and k6 tests. Enterprise starts at $25,000/year and adds premium support, custom retention, and deployment flexibility across public cloud, federal cloud, or bring-your-own-cloud. The retention difference is the thing to plan around. On the free tier your data is gone after 14 days, which is fine for live debugging and useless for quarter-over-quarter capacity planning. Retention, not ingestion volume, is usually what pushes a team from Free to Pro. Who it is for: platform, SRE, and DevOps teams, and increasingly solo developers running a handful of services who want real dashboards without operating a storage backend. The self-managed open-source route suits teams with data residency requirements or those already running Prometheus who want only the visualisation layer. How it compares: Datadog is the closest full-service competitor, materially easier to adopt because everything is one integrated product, and materially more expensive, with a pricing model that has surprised a lot of teams at scale. New Relic is similar in breadth with simpler per-user pricing. Better Stack and Honeycomb are lighter, more opinionated options, with Honeycomb notably stronger for high-cardinality tracing. Grafana's advantages are the open-source core, backend neutrality, no vendor lock-in on your data, and the largest dashboard and plugin ecosystem in the category; the cost is that you assemble a stack rather than buying one. Start on the free tier and let retention, not ingestion, decide when you upgrade.

n8n

Workflow automation you can self-host

n8n is a workflow automation platform that connects apps, APIs, and AI models through a visual node editor, and it bills per workflow execution rather than per step, which makes multi-step automations dramatically cheaper to run than on step-priced competitors. The billing model is the single most important thing to understand about it. In n8n an execution is a single run of your entire workflow, and it does not matter how many steps that workflow contains or how much data it processes. A 40-node workflow that enriches a lead, scores it, writes to a CRM, and posts to Slack costs one execution. On platforms that charge per task or per operation, that same run can cost 40 units. For anyone building genuinely complex automations, that difference compounds fast. n8n is also self-hostable. The standard self-hosted version is available on GitHub, where the project has over 202,000 stars, under a FairCode license. Self-hosting is the usual route for teams with data residency requirements or those who want unlimited executions on their own infrastructure. Cloud pricing, billed annually, runs: Starter at 20 EUR/month for 2,500 workflow executions, Pro at 50 EUR/month for 10,000 executions, and Business at 667 EUR/month for 40,000 executions. Enterprise is quoted for custom execution volumes. Starter and Pro trials require no credit card and give you all Pro features against Starter limits, meaning 5 concurrent executions and 2,500 executions. The Business trial runs 14 days with full access and does require a card. All trials include 800 AI Assistant credits. Who it is for: technical teams and automation-minded founders who have outgrown no-code glue. n8n sits deliberately between Zapier's simplicity and writing your own integration service. It expects you to be comfortable reading JSON, writing the occasional JavaScript expression, and thinking about error branches. In exchange you get branching, looping, custom code nodes, self-hosting, and AI agent nodes that are hard to reach in simpler tools. How it compares: Zapier is easier for non-technical users, has a far larger app catalogue, and is the safer pick if the automation is simple and the person maintaining it is not an engineer. Make (formerly Integromat) is closer to n8n in visual power and is generally cheaper than Zapier, but is not self-hostable. Activepieces is the nearest open-source alternative. Against all three, n8n's advantages are the per-execution pricing, self-hosting, and the depth of its AI and code nodes; its disadvantage is a steeper learning curve and a smaller integration catalogue than Zapier's. Evaluate it when your Zapier bill starts scaling with workflow complexity rather than with business volume, or when a compliance requirement rules out sending your data through a third-party cloud.