# Maple vs Grafana Grafana is the dashboard most engineers already know, and behind it sits a stack: Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Mimir or Prometheus for metrics, each with its own query language. Maple is an open-source observability platform that stores all three signals in one place behind one query surface. Below: where the two differ, where Grafana is ahead, and what the same month costs on each. ## Where Maple and Grafana differ Every cell is a sentence, not a checkmark. The gutter says who has the edge on that row; rows where both tools do the same thing are collapsed into one line at the end. ### Where they differ | Topic | Maple | Grafana | Edge | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Backends to run | One system. Traces, logs and metrics land in one store, keyed by the same trace id. | Loki, Tempo and Mimir or Prometheus, each deployed, scaled and upgraded on its own, with Grafana in front. | Maple | | Query languages | One visual builder across every signal, SQL through the API and the MCP server when you want it. | PromQL for metrics, LogQL for logs, TraceQL for traces. Three grammars, three mental models. | Maple | | Pricing model | $39 a month with 100 GB per signal included, then $0.30 per GB. No per-user fee. | Free tier, then $19 a month plus $8 per active user, $6.50 per thousand active metric series, and $0.45 per GB of logs and traces ingested. Retention and query volume are billed on top. [1] | Maple | | Per-seat fees | Unlimited. Every engineer, on-call responder and manager gets a login. | $8 per active user beyond the three included on Pro. [1] | Maple | | Time to first trace | Point an OTLP exporter at Maple. First traces arrive within minutes. | Provision each backend, connect each as a data source, then build the first dashboard. | Maple | | Source code | On GitHub under FSL-1.1, converting to Apache 2.0 two years after each release. One repository for the whole platform. | AGPL-3.0 for Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Mimir. Grafana Cloud itself is proprietary. [2] | Even | | Self-hosting | One deployment: the platform and its database. | Fully self-hostable with mature Helm charts, at the cost of operating four services. | Even | | OpenTelemetry | OTLP in. Nothing else to translate. | OTLP through Alloy or the Collector, fanned out to Tempo, Loki and Mimir. [3] | Even | ### Where Grafana is ahead | Topic | Maple | Grafana | Edge | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Plugins | No plugin system. Dashboards are built from Maple's own panels. | Hundreds of panel and data-source plugins, dashboards-as-code, and a community library of dashboards for almost anything. [4] | Grafana | | PromQL compatibility | No PromQL. Existing Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alert rules don't import. | PromQL is the lingua franca. Existing dashboards and recording rules carry over unchanged. | Grafana | | Non-telemetry data sources | Telemetry only. | Query Postgres, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch and dozens more from one panel. [4] | Grafana | | On-call | Alerts route to Slack, PagerDuty, Discord, Telegram, email and webhooks. No built-in schedules. | Grafana IRM with on-call schedules, escalation chains and incident timelines. [5] | Grafana | **Both have:** Distributed tracing · Log management · Metrics and dashboards · Alerting · Error tracking · Kubernetes monitoring · Public API · MCP server for agents ## The same month, billed twice A reference workload priced on both at list price. Change the sliders underneath for your own numbers. **Reference workload:** Active metric series 50 k series · Log volume 100 GB/mo · Trace volume 100 GB/mo · Team size 10 users | Maple | Amount | | --- | --- | | Startup plan — 100 GB per signal included | $39 | | Overage — 116 GB over × $0.30 | $35 | | Team seats — No per-seat fees | Free | | **Total** | **$74** | | Grafana Cloud | Amount | | --- | --- | | Platform fee — Base plan | $19 | | Metrics — 50k series (10k free) | $260 | | Logs — 100 GB (50 GB free) | $23 | | Traces — 100 GB (50 GB free) | $23 | | Users — 10 users × $8 (3 free) | $56 | | **Total** | **$380** | $306 less per month on Maple List prices checked August 2026. Sources at the foot of the page. Maple pricing based on the Startup plan ($39/mo with 100 GB included per signal — logs, traces, metrics — then $0.30/GB, billed per signal), metered on uncompressed (decoded OTLP) bytes. Grafana bills active series (1 data point per minute per series), so the Maple estimate converts 1k active series to ~4.32 GB/mo assuming ~0.1 KB per decoded metric data point — your real ratio depends on attribute sizes. Grafana log and trace rates model ingest (process + write); retention and query fees are not included. Interactive calculator: https://maple.dev/compare/grafana#calculator ## Moving from Grafana Telemetry moves with one exporter change. Dashboards and alert rules don't cross vendors, so plan those as the real work. 1. **Re-point the Collector** If Alloy or the OpenTelemetry Collector already feeds Tempo, Loki and Mimir, add an OTLP exporter to Maple and run both until the alerts you care about fire from Maple. 2. **Rebuild the dashboards that matter** Grafana JSON doesn't import. Most teams find a handful of dashboards carry the load; rebuild those in Maple's builder and let the long tail lapse. 3. **Decommission the stack** Turn off Loki, Tempo, Mimir and Grafana once Maple is the source of truth. That is four services fewer to upgrade, scale and page on. ```yaml # otel-collector.yaml — Add Maple as a second exporter, run both, then drop the first. exporters: otlp/tempo: endpoint: tempo:4317 otlphttp/maple: endpoint: https://ingest.maple.dev headers: x-maple-ingest-key: ${env:MAPLE_INGEST_KEY} service: pipelines: traces: exporters: [otlp/tempo, otlphttp/maple] logs: exporters: [otlp/tempo, otlphttp/maple] metrics: exporters: [otlp/tempo, otlphttp/maple] ``` ## Common questions ### Does Maple replace the whole Grafana stack? Yes. Maple replaces Grafana for dashboards and alerting, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces and Mimir or Prometheus for metrics with one platform. What it doesn't replace is Grafana as a general-purpose charting tool for non-telemetry data sources. ### How is Maple different from Grafana Cloud? Grafana Cloud operates Loki, Tempo and Mimir for you, but you still query three stores in three languages and pay per active user. Maple stores every signal in one place, correlates them by trace id automatically, and charges for data only. ### Do I need to learn a new query language? No. Maple's query builder works the same way for traces, logs and metrics. SQL is available through the API and the MCP server for the questions a builder can't express. There is no PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL to learn, and also no PromQL compatibility for dashboards you already have. ### Can I still self-host? Yes. Maple is on GitHub under FSL-1.1, converting to Apache 2.0. The difference from the LGTM stack is that you deploy one platform and one database instead of four services with their own scaling models. ### What about Grafana's plugins? Maple has no plugin ecosystem. If your dashboards lean on community panels or on querying business databases alongside telemetry, Grafana is ahead here and this page says so above. Most observability dashboards use a dozen panel types, and Maple's builder covers those. ## Where the Grafana claims come from Vendor facts on this page link to the vendor's own pages and carry the month they were last checked. If one is stale, tell us. 1. [Grafana Cloud pricing](https://grafana.com/pricing/) — checked August 2026 2. [Grafana licensing (AGPL-3.0)](https://grafana.com/licensing/) — checked August 2026 3. [Grafana Alloy](https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/) — checked August 2026 4. [Grafana plugins catalog](https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/) — checked August 2026 5. [Grafana IRM](https://grafana.com/products/cloud/irm/) — checked August 2026 ## Other comparisons - [Maple vs Datadog](https://maple.dev/compare/datadog.md) - [Maple vs New Relic](https://maple.dev/compare/new-relic.md) - [Maple vs Dash0](https://maple.dev/compare/dash0.md) - [Maple vs SigNoz](https://maple.dev/compare/signoz.md)