Grafana Faro vs JustAnalytics: Self-Hosted or Managed Frontend Observability?

Last November I spent a full weekend configuring Grafana Faro for a Next.js app. By Sunday night the SDK was instrumented, traces were flowing to Tempo, errors were landing in Loki. I felt accomplished.

Then Monday happened. A teammate asked where the session replays were. I explained that Faro's replay was experimental and we'd need to set up the recording collector ourselves. She asked about conversion funnels. I explained those don't exist in Grafana — we'd need Plausible or GA4. She asked about uptime monitoring for the API. I pointed at our separate UptimeRobot dashboard.

Three tools. Three dashboards. And I'd just burned a weekend on one of them.

That's the core tension with Grafana Faro. It's a good open-source frontend SDK for sending browser telemetry — errors, logs, traces, Web Vitals — to Grafana's backend stack. But Faro assumes you're already running Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus. It's a spoke without a hub unless you bring your own infrastructure or pay Grafana Cloud.

JustAnalytics takes the opposite approach: managed from the start. One script. Backend included. Analytics, errors, replay, uptime — same dashboard. No Helm charts, no Loki retention policies, no weekend debugging Tempo ingestion.

I probably should've evaluated both before picking Faro. Live and learn.

Both approaches have real trade-offs. If you're deciding between them, here's what I actually found.

Quick Verdict

TL;DR: Faro wins if you already run Grafana at scale and want deep customization. JustAnalytics wins if you want frontend observability without operating your own backend.

Grafana Faro works well for teams that already have Grafana infrastructure — Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Prometheus for metrics. Adding Faro extends that stack to the browser. Full control over retention, storage, and dashboards. The tradeoff? You're also responsible for running and scaling all those backends.

JustAnalytics bundles the backend. One script captures analytics, errors, traces, session replay, and uptime. Storage, retention, and dashboards are managed. The tradeoff is less flexibility — you're using our schema, our retention periods, our dashboard layouts.

The honest question: Do you have a platform team maintaining Grafana infrastructure? Go with Faro. Are you three engineers trying to ship features, not manage observability backends? JustAnalytics.

Feature Comparison

Feature	JustAnalytics	Grafana Faro
Frontend error tracking	Yes (source-mapped, issue grouping)	Yes (sends to Loki, needs source map upload)
Web Vitals / RUM	Yes (LCP, FID, CLS, INP in dashboard)	Yes (sends to Prometheus, you build dashboards)
Distributed tracing	Yes (OpenTelemetry-native, service maps)	Yes (sends to Tempo, you correlate manually)
Session replay	Yes (pixel-perfect DOM, privacy masking)	Experimental (requires backend setup)
Web analytics	Yes (pageviews, funnels, UTM, attribution)	No (not in scope)
Uptime monitoring	Yes (HTTP checks, SSL, status pages)	No (use Grafana Synthetic Monitoring separately)
Structured logs	Yes (ingestion, filtering, alerting)	Via Loki (you run it)
Backend required	No (managed)	Yes (Loki + Tempo + Prometheus)
Self-hosted option	No	Yes (core value prop)
Open source	No	Yes (Apache 2.0)
Pricing	Free: $0 (100K events), Pro: $49/mo (1M events)	SDK: free. Backends: your infra or Grafana Cloud

The shapes are different. Faro is an SDK that feeds into existing Grafana infrastructure. JustAnalytics is a complete platform that bundles both SDK and backend.

Where Grafana Faro Wins: Control and Ecosystem

Faro exists for teams already invested in Grafana's ecosystem. For those teams, it's a natural fit.

You own the data. Everything Faro collects lands in Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus — which you control. Retention policies, storage backends, access controls, compliance requirements — all yours. No vendor lock-in on the data layer. For teams in regulated industries or with strict data residency requirements, that matters. (If your legal team cares where bytes live, they'll like this.)

Unified backend for everything. If you're already shipping server traces to Tempo, Faro means your frontend traces join the same backend. Correlate a slow API call with the browser span that triggered it. One query language (LogQL, TraceQL) across frontend and backend. No context-switching between tools.

Grafana dashboards are wildly customizable. I've seen Grafana dashboards that would make Tufte weep. If your team has Grafana expertise, you can build exactly the views you need — frontend performance broken down by release, by route, by country, by device. Faro just feeds the data. You control the visualization. I'll admit I've lost hours tweaking panel layouts that nobody else cared about.

Experimental session replay exists. As of mid-2025, Faro supports session replay in an experimental capacity. It records DOM mutations and ships them to a collector you configure. Not turnkey — you need to set up storage and playback — but the capability exists if you're willing to invest.

Open source means auditability. Apache 2.0 license. You can read every line of code Faro executes in your users' browsers. For security teams that require auditing third-party scripts, that's a real advantage over closed-source alternatives.

The catch: Faro assumes you're already running Grafana infrastructure. Adding Faro to an existing stack is a day of work. Setting up Loki, Tempo, Prometheus, and Grafana from scratch — just to use Faro — is a week or more, plus ongoing maintenance.

If you don't already have the stack? You're probably not the target user.

Where JustAnalytics Wins: Managed Everything

Here's what Faro doesn't include: the backends.

Faro collects data on the frontend and ships it somewhere. That somewhere is your responsibility. Loki for logs and errors. Tempo for traces. Prometheus for metrics. All need to be provisioned, scaled, secured, and maintained.

JustAnalytics bundles the backend. One script — under 5KB — and you're done. Errors, traces, analytics, replay, uptime: all collected, stored, and visualized without touching infrastructure.

Zero-config install. Add the script tag. That's it. No Helm charts, no Kubernetes operators, no Loki retention policies. I've onboarded teams in under ten minutes — though I'll be honest, I've also spent an hour helping someone debug CORS headers that had nothing to do with us. Faro onboarding (for teams without existing Grafana) is measured in days.

Session replay works out of the box. Pixel-perfect DOM replay with automatic privacy masking. Click the error, watch the replay. No collector to configure, no storage to provision. It just works. For teams debugging "I can't reproduce it" bugs, replay is non-negotiable — and Faro's experimental replay requires significant setup to match.

Web analytics included. Pageviews. Funnels. UTM tracking. Cohort retention. Attribution. Faro doesn't touch this — it's an observability SDK, not an analytics platform. With Faro, you'd still need GA4 or Plausible alongside it. JustAnalytics bundles analytics in.

Uptime and cron monitoring bundled. HTTP checks, SSL expiry alerts, status pages, missed-cron detection. Faro doesn't cover uptime — you'd add Grafana Synthetic Monitoring separately, which is another component to configure. For teams running click-fraud detection with ClickzProtect, the same event-correlation approach lets you trace user sessions through marketing funnels. If you're tracking pay-per-call conversions with VeloCalls, frontend observability ties call attribution back to session replay.

Flat-rate pricing. Free tier: 100K events/month, $0. Pro tier: 1M events/month, $49/mo ($39/mo annual). No per-host charges. No usage spikes. Faro is free, but your Loki/Tempo/Prometheus infrastructure isn't — and Grafana Cloud's usage-based pricing can surprise you.

The Self-Hosted Question

Faro's core value proposition is self-hosting. You control the infrastructure, the data, and the compliance posture. Some teams genuinely need this.

But most teams I've worked with don't actually need self-hosted observability. They need observability. Period. The self-hosted part is overhead — engineering hours maintaining infrastructure instead of shipping features.

Real talk: if you're a 5-person startup choosing between "self-hosted Grafana stack" and "managed platform," you should probably pick managed. Your time is more expensive than a $49/month subscription. When you hit 50 engineers and have a dedicated platform team, revisit the decision.

The exception: regulatory requirements. If your compliance team requires data to stay in your VPC, Grafana + Faro is a legitimate option. JustAnalytics doesn't offer self-hosting. That's a real gap for some use cases.

Pricing Breakdown (as of July 2026)

JustAnalytics:

Free: $0/mo — 1 site, 100K events/mo, 6mo retention. Analytics only.
Pro: $49/mo ($39/mo annual) — 5 sites, 1M events/mo, 1yr retention. Errors, replay, APM, uptime, logs.
Enterprise: custom — unlimited. SSO/SAML, SLA, dedicated infrastructure.
AI Command Center: $25/mo add-on (requires Pro+).

Grafana Faro:

SDK: $0 (open source)
Self-hosted backends: your infrastructure costs
Grafana Cloud: starts ~$29/mo for basic stack, usage-based scaling

The cost comparison is tricky because Faro's "cost" depends entirely on your infrastructure choices. Running Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus on three m5.large EC2 instances runs ~$250/month in AWS alone — before storage, bandwidth, or engineering time. Grafana Cloud removes infrastructure overhead but adds usage-based billing that scales with data volume.

JustAnalytics Pro at $49/mo is cheaper than most self-hosted setups if you account for engineering time. More predictable than usage-based billing as you scale. But look — I work here, so take my math with a grain of salt.

Who Should Pick What

Already running Grafana + Loki + Tempo: Faro. It's the natural extension of your existing stack. You get unified observability across frontend and backend with data you control. The marginal effort to add Faro is low.

No existing Grafana infrastructure: JustAnalytics. Building Grafana infrastructure just to use Faro is backwards — you're taking on operational overhead for a frontend SDK. Managed is faster to deploy and cheaper to maintain.

Regulated industry with data residency requirements: Faro + self-hosted. If your compliance team requires data to stay in your infrastructure, JustAnalytics doesn't offer that. Faro + self-hosted Grafana keeps everything in your control.

Small team, shipping features: JustAnalytics. You don't have time to maintain observability infrastructure. You need observability that works. Add the script, check the dashboard, ship features. Don't overthink it.

Deep Grafana expertise on the team: Faro. If your team already builds custom Grafana dashboards and you want that level of control over frontend data, Faro delivers. Honestly, you'll have more fun with it than we can offer.

The Operational Reality

I've run both setups. Here's what actually matters at 2am when something breaks.

With Grafana Faro (and self-hosted backends): you're checking Grafana dashboards, but you're also responsible for those dashboards existing. Loki runs out of disk? Your problem. Tempo's ingestion rate spikes? Scale it yourself. Operational overhead is real. When the backend breaks, frontend telemetry stops — and suddenly you're debugging two systems instead of one. Ask me how I know.

With JustAnalytics: one login, one dashboard, one vendor to page if something's wrong. The operational surface is smaller. When support tickets mention "session replay isn't loading," I check the JustAnalytics status page, not three different backends.

Consolidation isn't about being anti-Grafana. Grafana is solid software. But running Grafana is a job. If you have someone whose job is running Grafana, great. If not, consider whether you should be creating that job.

For teams correlating frontend sessions with marketing attribution, our conversion funnel guide shows the error-to-funnel workflow. And the GA4 migration guide breaks down the transition from Google Analytics. Teams managing multiple browser profiles for testing should check how JustBrowser handles fingerprinting for QA automation.

Our Honest Take

Grafana Faro is a good open-source SDK for teams that already live in the Grafana ecosystem. If you have Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus running — and a platform team maintaining them — Faro extends that investment to the browser. The control is real. Ecosystem is mature. Community is active.

But Faro isn't a complete observability platform. It's an SDK. The platform is Loki + Tempo + Prometheus + Grafana, and you're responsible for all of it. For teams without that infrastructure, adopting Faro means adopting a bunch of operational overhead alongside it.

JustAnalytics trades control for convenience. You get less flexibility — our retention policies, our schemas, our dashboards. You get more coverage — analytics, replay, uptime in addition to errors and APM. And you get zero infrastructure to maintain.

The question isn't "which is better." It's "how much operational overhead are you willing to take on for frontend observability?" If the answer is "we have a platform team and we're already on Grafana," Faro makes sense. If the answer is "we want to check a dashboard, not run infrastructure," that's us.

More comparisons on the JustAnalytics blog — including our Plausible vs Fathom comparison, the Next.js 15 integration tutorial, and the Django middleware guide. For marketing teams combining observability with ad-spend protection, ClickzProtect's fraud detection integrates with the same attribution data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Grafana Faro free to use?

Faro itself is open-source and free. But it's just an SDK — it sends data to Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus, which you must run yourself. Self-hosting those backends costs engineering time and infrastructure. Grafana Cloud managed tiers start around $29/mo for basic observability, scaling with data volume.

Does Grafana Faro include session replay?

Faro added experimental session replay in 2024-2025, but it requires you to run the recording backend yourself and configure storage. JustAnalytics includes pixel-perfect DOM replay with privacy masking out of the box on the Pro plan at $49/mo — no backend setup required.

Can I use Grafana Faro without running my own Loki and Tempo?

You can point Faro at Grafana Cloud, which manages Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus for you. But then you're paying for Grafana Cloud's usage-based pricing, which can scale quickly. JustAnalytics bundles storage, ingestion, and dashboards in flat-rate plans — Free at 100K events/mo or Pro at $49/mo for 1M events.

Which is better for a small team without dedicated SRE?

JustAnalytics. Faro assumes you already have Grafana stack expertise and infrastructure. JustAnalytics is a single script install — no backend provisioning, no Helm charts, no storage sizing. For teams under 10 engineers without an SRE, managed beats self-hosted.

Try JustAnalytics

All-in-one observability in one under-5KB script: cookieless analytics + error tracking + APM + session replay + uptime + structured logs. Replaces GA4 + Sentry + Datadog + Pingdom + LogRocket. Free tier (100K events/mo), Pro $49/month ($39 annual).

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