Grafana Enterprise vs open source: what a Grafana license costs, and the free binary nobody mentions

Short answer. Grafana open source is free for commercial use under AGPLv3, with no user cap and no meter. Grafana Enterprise is the same software plus a commercial feature set that a purchased license key unlocks, and Grafana Labs publishes no price for that key. The detail most guides miss: Grafana also ships a free-to-use, proprietary-licensed Enterprise binary that matches the AGPL version feature for feature, so a company whose legal policy rules out AGPL can run Grafana at zero cost without ever touching an AGPL artifact.

That last point is worth a minute, because "we cannot use AGPL software" is the most common reason a Grafana rollout stalls inside a US enterprise, and the answer has been sitting on Grafana's own licensing page since 2021.

What changed in April 2021

On 20 April 2021 Grafana Labs moved its core projects from the Apache License v2.0 to AGPLv3. Grafana, Loki and Tempo all made the jump. The first affected releases were Grafana 8.0, Loki 2.3 and Tempo 1.0, so anything you are running on Grafana 7.x or older is still Apache-licensed and always will be.

Plugins, agents and certain libraries stayed on Apache. Grafana Labs maintains lists in each project's GitHub repository showing exactly what remained. If you are auditing a stack, that distinction matters: the collector shipping your metrics is usually not on the same license as the dashboard rendering them.

Is Grafana free for commercial use?

Yes. AGPLv3 is a free software license that permits commercial use, and Grafana Labs is not charging you to run it. The confusion comes from AGPL's section 13, which is genuinely stricter than GPL, and which people tend to describe from memory rather than from the text.

Here is the practical boundary. AGPL obligations engage when you modify the licensed source and then either distribute it or make the modified version available to users over a network. Two consequences follow:

• Running stock Grafana internally triggers nothing. Company size, user count and revenue are irrelevant. You have not modified it and you are not offering it to third parties.
• Your dashboards, queries, alert rules and configuration are not derivative works. Neither is the application whose metrics you happen to be graphing. Nothing you build alongside Grafana becomes AGPL by proximity.

Where it does bite is a SaaS product that forks Grafana, changes the code, and serves that fork to customers. Grafana Labs is explicit that this is the case it was aiming at, and it offers commercial licenses to companies who want to do exactly that without publishing their changes.

The free Enterprise binary, which almost nobody mentions

Plenty of legal departments have a blanket policy against AGPL that no amount of section-13 explanation will move. Grafana Labs anticipated this. From its licensing page:

Users who don't intend to modify Grafana code can simply use our Enterprise download. This is a free-to-use, proprietary-licensed, compiled binary that matches the features of the AGPL version, and can be upgraded to take advantage of all the commercial features in Grafana Enterprise with the purchase of a license key.

Read that carefully, because three things are true at once. The Enterprise download costs nothing. It is not AGPL, it is proprietary. And with no license key installed it does everything open source Grafana does, no more and no less. It is the same artifact you would install if you were buying Enterprise, running in an unlicensed state.

So the correct answer to "our policy forbids AGPL, can we still use Grafana" is yes, download the Enterprise build, run it unlicensed, and revisit the license key only if you later want the commercial features. Grafana says it expects to offer similar builds for Loki and Tempo.

What a Grafana Enterprise license actually unlocks

The license key turns on a specific, documented list. This is what you are paying for, and it splits fairly cleanly into governance, operations and connectivity.

Query caching deserves a note for anyone connecting Grafana to a warehouse that bills by the query. If forty people open the same dashboard at 9am, open source Grafana sends forty sets of queries. On BigQuery or Snowflake that is a real line item, and caching is an Enterprise feature. It is one of the few cases where the license arguably pays for itself in warehouse spend rather than in convenience.

The data source list is the part that decides it for data teams

Grafana's premium plugin list is where the license question stops being philosophical. These are Enterprise-only data sources:

• Warehouses and databases: Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Aurora, Oracle Database, IBM Db2, MongoDB, CockroachDB, DynamoDB, Azure CosmosDB, SAP HANA
• Observability vendors: Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Splunk, Honeycomb, SumoLogic, Wavefront, LogicMonitor
• Business systems: Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira, Zendesk, Looker, Adobe Analytics, PagerDuty

Postgres, MySQL, Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB and the major cloud monitoring sources all ship free in open source Grafana. Snowflake does not. So "we will just use free Grafana on top of our warehouse" works if the warehouse is Postgres and does not work if it is Snowflake or Databricks, at least not with a plugin Grafana maintains.

On Grafana Cloud you can see what this is worth, because Grafana prices the same distinction openly: dashboards are $8.00 per active user per month without premium plugins and $55.00 with them. That is 6.9 times more for the same product, and the add-on applies to every active user, not just the person who opened the Snowflake panel. The full breakdown, including the seventeen separate meters behind Grafana Cloud's $19 platform fee, is in our Grafana pricing guide.

How much is a Grafana Enterprise license?

Grafana Labs publishes no figure for a self-managed Enterprise license. The documentation ends with "to purchase or obtain a trial license, contact the Grafana Labs Sales Team", and there is no price table anywhere on the site. Third-party guides estimate roughly $50 to $150 per user per year, but those are secondary sources reporting negotiated deals and should be treated as a range, not a rate card.

Two published numbers give you better anchors than a guess. On Grafana Cloud, an Enterprise contract carries a $25,000 per year minimum spend commit, stated under every single product on Grafana's pricing page. And the $8.00 versus $55.00 per-active-user gap is Grafana's own valuation of the premium plugin set. If you are building a business case, those two figures are checkable and the per-user estimates are not.

So which one should you run?

Run open source Grafana if you self-host, your data sources are in the free plugin list, and access control lives at the network or database layer rather than inside Grafana. This covers most engineering teams and it is genuinely free forever. Do budget for the operational side: somebody has to patch it, back up the SQLite or Postgres behind it, and notice when the box goes down. Grafana cannot alert you that Grafana is down, so pair it with an external uptime check that runs outside your own infrastructure.

Run the free Enterprise binary if your legal team will not approve AGPL. Same features, no cost, no AGPL artifact in the estate, and a straightforward upgrade path if you buy a key later. There is no downside to defaulting to this build.

Buy the license when a specific requirement names it: an auditor asking for change logs, a security review asking for SAML, a warehouse bill that query caching would cut, or a Snowflake connection you cannot get any other way. Those are all concrete triggers. "It seems more enterprise" is not one.

The question neither edition answers

Whichever build you land on, Grafana answers questions you have already built a panel for. That is its design and it is very good at it. What it does not do is handle the question somebody asks on a Tuesday that needs a join across three tables nobody modeled, which still lands as a ticket on whoever owns the data.

That is the gap Agentsql fills. It connects read-only to Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery, turns a plain-English question into SQL, runs it, and shows the SQL every time so an analyst can check the logic before anyone acts on the number. Snowflake is a first-class connection rather than a premium plugin upgrade. If you are still comparing options, the BI tools comparison puts the seat models side by side, and text to SQL versus BI dashboards covers where each approach genuinely wins.