Grafana Cloud's free tier is generous but limited to 10,000 metrics. Scaling past that costs $8/mo per 1,000 active series. Beszel gives you the same core metrics with zero complexity for $3/mo.
Beszel is a lightweight, self-hosted server monitoring tool that costs $3/mo on InstaPods with unlimited metrics. Grafana Cloud is a powerful, enterprise-grade observability platform that starts free but costs $120/mo or more once you monitor 5+ servers with Docker. Choose Beszel for simple server and Docker monitoring. Choose Grafana if you need custom dashboards, PromQL queries, or log aggregation.
Last updated: 2026-03-16| Feature | Grafana Cloud | Beszel |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | Free (10k series), then $8/1k series | $3/mo total (self-hosted on InstaPods) |
| Setup Complexity | Prometheus + Grafana + dashboards | One-click deploy, works immediately |
| Active Metrics Series | 10,000 free, $8/1k after | No metering - collect everything |
| Pre-Built Dashboards | Community dashboards (manual setup) | Beautiful dashboard out of the box |
| Data Retention | 14 days (free), 13 months (paid) | Unlimited - your server storage |
| Log Aggregation | Loki (50GB free) | Not included |
| Custom Dashboards | Fully customizable (Grafana) | Fixed dashboard layout |
| PromQL / Query Language | Full PromQL support | Simple UI - no query language needed |
| Resource Usage | Prometheus + Grafana: 500MB+ RAM | Agent uses <10MB RAM (single Go binary) |
| Docker Monitoring | Via cAdvisor + dashboards | Built-in, no extra config |
| Alerting | Complex alert rules via Alertmanager | Simple threshold alerts (CPU, memory, disk) |
| Source Code | AGPL (Grafana), Apache (Prometheus) | Open source (MIT license) |
Limitations that push you toward self-hosting.
Grafana Cloud requires understanding Prometheus metrics, PromQL queries, and Grafana dashboard configuration. It's powerful but takes hours to set up properly.
The free tier allows 10,000 active metrics series. A server with Docker containers can easily generate 5,000+ series. Monitor 3 servers and you're already paying.
Grafana doesn't come with useful dashboards pre-built. You need to find community dashboards or build your own - which means learning PromQL.
A full monitoring stack needs Prometheus (scraping), node_exporter (metrics), cAdvisor (Docker), and Grafana (visualization). That's 4 components to install and maintain.
What you get when you own your infrastructure.
Deploy Beszel, install the agent on your servers, and you have a monitoring dashboard immediately. No dashboards to configure, no queries to write.
Beszel is one binary for the hub and one for the agent. Compare that to Prometheus + node_exporter + cAdvisor + Grafana.
Beszel shows your metrics in a clean UI without needing to learn PromQL. Click on a server, see its stats. That simple.
No surprises from metrics series growth. Whether you monitor 1 server or 20, the hosting cost stays at $3/mo.
Monitoring 5 servers with Docker containers, keeping 6 months of history.
No - and that's the point. Grafana is an incredibly flexible visualization platform that can display almost any data in any format. Beszel is purpose-built for server monitoring with a fixed, beautiful dashboard. If you need custom dashboards and PromQL queries, use Grafana. If you want server monitoring that just works, use Beszel.
Yes, but you'd still need to set up Prometheus, node_exporter, cAdvisor, configure scraping targets, and build dashboards. The complexity isn't in where Grafana runs - it's in the stack itself. Beszel replaces all of that with a single binary.
Beszel handles the monitoring needs of most teams. If you eventually need custom dashboards, PromQL queries, or advanced alerting rules, you can migrate to a Grafana stack. But most teams find that Beszel's built-in dashboard covers 90% of what they actually look at.
Beszel focuses on infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network, Docker). It doesn't support custom application metrics. For those, you'd need Prometheus or a similar tool.
Yes, Beszel is free and open source under the MIT license. You can self-host it on your own server at no cost. On InstaPods, you can deploy Beszel with one click for $3/mo, which covers the hosting infrastructure so you don't need to manage your own server.
Grafana Cloud is worth it if you need advanced observability with custom dashboards, PromQL queries, and log aggregation across large infrastructure. For teams monitoring fewer than 10 servers who primarily need CPU, memory, disk, and Docker stats, Beszel provides 90% of what you actually look at for a fraction of the cost.
For simple server monitoring, Beszel is a popular alternative to Grafana. It provides pre-built dashboards for CPU, memory, disk, network, and Docker container stats without requiring Prometheus configuration or PromQL knowledge. Other lightweight alternatives include Uptime Kuma (for uptime monitoring) and Netdata (for real-time metrics).
Deploy Beszel on InstaPods and stop paying for features that should be free.
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