how sixty compares — Open-source stack, hosted
Sixty vs Grafana Cloud
The most flexible and the most work. Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and OpenTelemetry, hosted for you — and still a project rather than a product.
What Grafana Cloud is good at
Grafana is the one you cannot be locked out of. It is open source at every layer — Prometheus and Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, all speaking OpenTelemetry — so the data is in formats you own and the same stack runs on your own hardware if the hosted bill ever stops making sense. Nobody else on this page can say that.
The free tier is unusually generous, the dashboards are the best in the industry at what they do, and if you have a specific question about your system there is almost certainly a way to ask it. For a team with the appetite to build the thing they want, this is the highest ceiling available.
Grafana Cloud costs A large free tier, then usage — around $0.50 per GB of traces or logs, as published on their pricing page in August 2026. Sixty is €14.99 a month, flat.
What Sixty does differently
It is also, unambiguously, a construction kit. Somebody has to run collectors, decide what to export, choose retention, build the dashboards and write the alert rules — and then keep all of it in step as the app changes. That is a real and rewarding job and it is completely incompatible with "I built this app with an agent and it got slow after Tuesday".
The deeper mismatch is that dashboards answer questions you already thought to ask. The regression that takes an app down is almost always the one nobody built a panel for, because on the day the panel was built that query returned thirty rows and looked fine.
Sixty inverts that. Nothing is asked, because nothing is configured: it learns what every operation normally does and speaks up when a deploy changes it. There is no panel to have thought of in advance, which is the only way the unknown case gets caught.
Side by side
The same eleven questions the full comparison asks of every tool, with the two rows Sixty loses left in.
| What is being compared | Sixty | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| What you set upBefore it can tell you anything at all. | Nothing. One command, no dashboards, no thresholds | Collectors, exporters, dashboards, alert rules — all of it |
| Time to the first findingInstall to a sentence that names a cause. | Your next deploy | Days, and it is your dashboard that finds it |
| Compares one release to the lastAutomatically, without being asked a question. | Yes — every finding is one release against the one before | Only if you build the comparison yourself |
| Rows per call, queries per renderThe shape of what your database work returns, not how long it took. | Yes, this is the core signal | Only what you instrument yourself |
| Page vitals per routeLargest paint, interaction response, layout shift. | Yes, broken down by country | Yes — frontend observability, which you configure |
| Failures that report successEmpty results, refused requests, buttons wired to nothing. | Yes — this is most of what it finds | Only what you instrument and then alert on |
| Evidence handed to your coding agentNot a dashboard to read — a payload the thing that writes your code can act on. | Yes, over MCP, with the numbers and stack frames attached | No |
| Data collected about your usersWhat ends up on somebody else’s server because you installed it. | None. No IDs, no cookies, no URLs, no replay | Whatever you choose to send |
| Infrastructure, logs, containersHosts, pods, queues — the layer under the application. | No | Yes — this is its home ground |
| Runtimes it measuresServer-side. Browser coverage is separate and mostly universal. | Node and Postgres. Any front end, any backend language | Everything, through OpenTelemetry |
| Where the bill startsList price for a comparable product, read August 2026. | €14.99 a month, flat | Free tier, then usage |
Which one to pick
Pick Grafana Cloud when
- You want to own your telemetry, in open formats, with self-hosting as an option.
- You have infrastructure — Kubernetes, queues, databases — and want it all in one place.
- Somebody on the team enjoys building this and has the time for it.
- You have specific questions and want the freedom to ask exactly them.
Pick Sixty when
- Nobody there wants to run a collector or maintain a dashboard.
- You want the tool to notice, rather than to be a place where you could have noticed.
- One command, one price, and no decisions about retention.
- The thing you want caught is the one you would never have built a panel for.
These are not mutually exclusive and the honest answer is often both. Nothing here refuses to run alongside Grafana Cloud, and a lot of people keep it.
Questions people actually ask
Is Sixty open source?
The agents are, and the whole thing runs on your own machines with the compose file in the repository — the hosted version exists so you do not have to. What it is not is a platform you extend: there is no query language and no dashboard builder, on purpose. Those are the parts that make Grafana powerful and make it a project.
Can I use OpenTelemetry with Sixty?
The collector speaks OTLP, so instrumentation you already have can report to it. What Sixty adds on top is the part OpenTelemetry deliberately leaves to you: deciding what normal is for each operation, and saying when a release changed it.
The other comparisons
Sixty vs Datadog
Everything, for everyone, billed per host. Unbeatable if you run infrastructure; a lot of product to carry if you run one app on Vercel.
Full-stack observability platformSixty vs New Relic
The same breadth as Datadog on a friendlier meter, with a genuinely large free tier — and the same afternoon of setup before it says anything.
Error tracking, plus performanceSixty vs Sentry
Best-in-class for the crash you can see. The gap is the failure that never throws — and what it stores about the person who hit it.
Front-end analytics, bundledSixty vs Vercel Speed Insights
Real page timings with one checkbox, from the platform you deploy to. It stops at the edge of the browser — nothing under it is measured.