BUYER GUIDE
Lightup Pricing: Lightup Cost, Cloud vs Enterprise Plans, and Alternatives
Lightup runs a real pricing page with a full two column feature comparison, forty or so rows deep, and not one dollar sign anywhere on it. Both columns end in the same button: Get Quote. That is a legitimate way to sell enterprise software, but it leaves a buyer with a quote and nothing to measure it against. So this page does the next best thing. It reads the matrix Lightup does publish, pulls out the four limits that actually decide which tier you land in, and sets them beside a platform that prints its number on the website.
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How much does Lightup cost?
Lightup does not publish a price. Both plans, Cloud and Enterprise, end in a Get Quote button, and a search of AWS Marketplace in September 2026 returned no Lightup listing, so there is no public list price to check a quote against. All Lightup plans are annual subscriptions. What the company does publish is capacity: 10 users and 2 workspaces on Cloud, custom on Enterprise.
Side by side
Lightup pricing compared
Swipe to see all columns →
| What is capped | Lightup Cloud | Lightup Enterprise | Why it decides your tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Get Quote, annual subscription | Get Quote, annual subscription | No figure on either plan, and no AWS Marketplace listing to benchmark a quote against |
| Users | 10 | Custom | A hard seat cap, so the eleventh person on the data team is a tier change rather than an add-on |
| Workspaces | 2 | Custom | Two covers production and staging and nothing else, so a second business unit pushes you up |
| Data retention and state | 30 days | 6 or more months | Thirty days cannot show a quarter over quarter trend or support a seasonal baseline review |
| Support | Community | Custom, with a dedicated success manager | A paid annual contract on the entry plan carries community support only |
| Databricks coverage | Partial | All | Lightup footnotes the split itself, so ask which Databricks surfaces the Cloud plan misses |
| Single sign-on | Google SSO and Okta | Plus SAML and Microsoft AD | Okta on the entry plan is more generous than most rivals, including us |
| Role based access control | Limited | Full | Limited is not defined on the page, so ask what a role can and cannot scope |
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud or hybrid | Hybrid is the Enterprise only answer to a data residency requirement |
| Catalog integrations | None | Alation, Atlan, Collibra | If the catalog is your system of record, the Cloud plan does not reach it |
| Ticketing | Jira | Jira, ServiceNow, Opsgenie | ServiceNow shops are on the Enterprise plan by default, whatever the seat count says |
| Query governance | Not included | Included | This is the control that stops a scan from running away inside your warehouse |
Positioning and pricing models are summarized in good faith from each vendor's public pages, September 2026. Verify current terms with the vendor.
What you get
What the published matrix tells you, once you read it as a price list
Lightup publishes the ladder and withholds the number, including on AWS Marketplace
Plenty of vendors in this category keep list pricing off the website. What makes Lightup unusual is how complete the rest of the page is. The comparison table runs through plan limits, data quality indicators, incident detection, AI and automation, infrastructure, security, operations and integrations, checkmark by checkmark, and then both columns terminate in Get Quote. There is no anchor price, no starting-at figure, no per-seat rate, and no published unit of consumption at all. We then checked the one channel that usually forces a number into the open. Monte Carlo, Sifflet, Bigeye, Datafold, Anomalo, Collibra, Elementary and Acceldata all carry AWS Marketplace listings with an annual contract price on the face of them. A search of AWS Marketplace in September 2026 returned no Lightup listing of any kind. That is worth knowing before your first call, because it means the usual benchmarking trick is unavailable: you cannot pull a comparable public contract and work out whether the quote you are holding is normal. Every number you get will arrive from the same side of the table as the person quoting it.
Thirty days of retention is the limit most teams hit before the seat cap
The row that gets skimmed is Data Retention and State Management, and on the Cloud plan it reads 30 days against 6 or more months on Enterprise. Read that as a product constraint, not a storage footnote. Anomaly detection is a comparison against history, so the history you keep is the baseline you get. Thirty days means a monitor cannot tell you that this month looks wrong relative to the same month last quarter, and it means a data quality review covering a fiscal quarter has to be reconstructed from exports rather than read off the platform. It also affects the audit conversation. If someone asks you to evidence that a certified table held its freshness SLA across the last two quarters, a thirty day window cannot answer that on its own. Teams usually discover this three or four months in, which is deep into an annual commitment. For comparison, our Team plan at 299 dollars a month billed yearly keeps 90 days of history and publishes that on the pricing page, and the tier above it keeps more.
Community support on a paid annual plan is the line worth negotiating first
The Support row on the Cloud column says Community. Not standard, not business hours, not email with a response target. Community. The dedicated customer success manager row below it is a dash on Cloud and Custom on Enterprise, and the SLA row reads Standard against Custom. Put those three together and the entry plan is a paid annual subscription whose escalation path is a public forum. That may be perfectly workable for a team of engineers who like reading source, and Lightup deserves credit for stating it plainly rather than burying it. But it is the single cheapest thing to fix in a negotiation, because support terms usually cost a vendor far less to concede than seats or capacity do. Go into the call knowing the published baseline, ask for a named contact and a written response target in the order form, and treat any verbal reassurance about how responsive the team is as unpriced.
Where Lightup is genuinely more generous than the field, including us
An honest comparison has to include the places the other product wins, so here is one that matters. Lightup includes Google SSO and Okta on its entry plan. Most of this category, and that includes our own pricing, treats single sign-on as an enterprise upsell. Sifflet gates SSO at its middle tier. We gate SSO and the audit log to our Scale plan at 799 dollars a month billed yearly, and we say so on the pricing page rather than hide it. If your security team requires Okta on day one and the budget is entry level, Lightup Cloud clears that bar without a tier change and several alternatives do not. The same applies to AI based anomaly detection, advanced anomaly modeling, custom seasonality and incident feedback with auto-tuning, all of which appear on the Cloud column rather than being held back. The gating at Lightup is concentrated in retention, support, governance, catalog reach and deployment, not in the detection engine itself. That is a coherent way to build a ladder and it tells you which conversations are winnable.
How it works
From connected to caught
Count seats and workspaces before the first call, not after the quote
Ten users is a small number once you include analytics engineers, the platform team, the analysts who want to see why a dashboard is stale and the one person in finance who reads the freshness board. Workspaces are tighter still at two. Before you speak to anyone, write down the actual headcount who will need a login in year one and the number of environments you intend to separate, then decide whether Cloud is a plan you would still be on in month nine. Ask whether a read-only viewer consumes a seat, whether service accounts and API clients count, and what the mechanics are when you cross ten: an overage rate, a mid-term uplift, or a forced move to Enterprise. Those three outcomes have very different costs and the page does not say which applies.
Get the retention number written into the order form
Thirty days and six or more months are both published, which is useful, but only one of them is a commitment you can hold someone to. The Enterprise figure is open ended on the high side, which in practice means it is negotiable and therefore worth negotiating. Decide what window your own governance actually needs, usually 13 months if anyone runs year over year comparisons or wants a full fiscal year of evidence, and put that number in the contract rather than accepting the marketing phrase. Ask a second question while you are there: when retention lapses, what happens to the incident record and the metric history separately. Some platforms age out the raw series but keep the incident timeline, and that distinction decides whether an old incident is still auditable.
Ask exactly what Partial Databricks support excludes
The matrix carries an asterisk and a footnote that says Databricks support is Partial in Cloud and Full in Enterprise, across Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Postgres and Athena which are all listed as available on both plans. Lightup flagging the gap itself is a point in its favor, but Partial is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Get the specifics in writing before you sign: whether Unity Catalog metadata is read, whether Delta Live Tables and streaming tables are covered, whether Databricks SQL warehouses and job clusters are both reachable, and whether column level profiling behaves the same as it does on Snowflake. If Databricks is your primary platform rather than a secondary one, this single footnote may be the whole tier decision, regardless of how many seats you need.
Benchmark the quote against a number that is actually published
You cannot compare a Lightup quote to a Lightup list price, because there is not one. You can compare it to published prices elsewhere, and that is the only benchmark available. Acceldata sells a platform contract at 10,000 dollars for 12 months on AWS Marketplace and a separate Data Reliability dimension at 5,000 dollars metered on average terabytes processed monthly. Sifflet sells a 48,000 dollar annual contract against a published ceiling of 1,000 monitored assets. Our own Scale plan is 799 dollars a month billed yearly, 9,588 dollars for the year, for up to 1,500 monitored tables with column level lineage, single sign-on and an audit log. Those are three different meters and none of them is Lightup, but together they bracket what this category costs. If the quote in front of you sits far outside that bracket, you have earned the right to ask why in the call rather than after the renewal.
What Lightup means by a DQI, and why the unit matters when quotes are compared
Lightup organizes its product around data quality indicators, abbreviated DQI throughout the comparison table, and the matrix lists five varieties: prebuilt single source DQIs, data compare DQIs, multi-column DQIs, custom DQIs and DQI slicing. All five appear on both plans, which is unusual and generous. The reason to care about the vocabulary is that every vendor in this category counts something different, and the thing they count is the thing you eventually pay for. Monte Carlo counts monitors and sells them through credits. Metaplane and Bigeye count monitored tables. Sifflet advertises monitored assets on the website and sells platform credits on the contract. Acceldata counts average terabytes processed per month on one dimension and accounts or workspaces on another. Datadog counts host hours for clusters and job hours for orchestrators. Because Lightup publishes no price, it also publishes no unit, which means the first real question in the sales call is not how much but per what. Ask whether a quote is built on seats, on DQIs, on data sources, on scanned volume or on a flat platform fee, and then ask what happens to each of those as your warehouse grows. A quote you cannot decompose into a rate and a quantity cannot be forecast, and a contract you cannot forecast will surprise you at renewal rather than at signature.
The agentic interface is real and it does not change the contract question
Lightup now runs a banner announcing an agentic interface that works natively with Claude and Gemini, alongside a Data Observability Agent and a product called Genie, both marked Beta on the site navigation in September 2026. That is a genuine direction of travel for this whole category and it is reasonable to want it. It is also worth separating from the commercial question you are trying to answer. Beta labels mean the feature set can move inside your contract term, and none of the agentic features appear as priced line items or as gated rows in the published comparison table, so you cannot tell from the outside whether they are included in the Cloud plan, held for Enterprise, or metered separately later. Ask which of them is generally available on the plan you are quoted, whether any of them are priced separately today or intended to be, and whether the agent consumes your own model credentials or the vendor infrastructure. The last one has a real budget consequence, because an agent that runs on your keys puts an unbounded inference bill on your side of the line.
Why there is no public Lightup price anywhere, and what to do about it
We looked in the three places a US buyer would normally look. The vendor pricing page publishes a complete feature matrix and no figures. AWS Marketplace, where most of this category now lists a twelve month contract price because cloud committed spend drives procurement, returned nothing for Lightup in September 2026. The review aggregators that rank for the query, SourceForge, Slashdot, Crunchbase and the various tool directories, carry company profiles and feature summaries rather than contract figures, which is the usual pattern when a vendor has never published one for them to copy. So the practical answer is that you will negotiate without an anchor, and the counter to that is to build your own. Write down the three variables that drive any quote in this category before the call: how many tables or assets you monitor, how many people need a login, and how much data those checks scan in a month. Get a quote expressed as a rate against each one rather than a single annual number. Then run the same three variables against a vendor that publishes, and you will know within a few minutes whether the number you were given is inside the market or outside it.
Lightup Data is a San Francisco company, which removes one procurement question
The footer lists Lightup Data, Inc. at 548 Market Street, PMB 172070, San Francisco, California 94104, with a US telephone number. For a US buyer that quietly settles a set of questions that stall contracts in legal at other vendors in this category: which entity signs, what law governs, where the support hours fall relative to your working day, and how the data processing addendum handles cross border transfer. Sifflet, to take the nearest comparison, is a Paris company whose structured data lists an area served of FR and a French support number, which is not a criticism of the product but is three extra conversations before signature. None of this is a reason to choose one product over another on merit. It is a reason to sequence your evaluation sensibly, because a shorter legal path is worth real weeks, and weeks are the currency you are actually spending while a pipeline keeps breaking without monitoring on it.
What you are buying when the price is published instead
We take the other side of this argument, so it is fair to state it plainly and let you judge. Our plans are on the pricing page: Starter at 99 dollars a month billed yearly for up to 50 monitored tables, Team at 299 for up to 250 tables with end to end lineage and 90 days of history, Scale at 799 for up to 1,500 tables with column level lineage, single sign-on, an audit log and multi-warehouse connections. Fourteen day trial, no card. We connect read-only to Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Redshift, we are dbt-native, and we send to Slack and PagerDuty. We are deliberately narrower than Lightup: no unstructured data quality, no data remediation, no reconciliation product, and single sign-on sits on our top tier where Lightup includes Okta at entry. What a published price buys you is a decision you can make on a Tuesday afternoon without a procurement cycle, and a renewal number you already know. If your requirements run past what we cover, an enterprise quote is the right instrument and this page is here to help you read it.
Questions buyers ask
Lightup pricing FAQ
Does Lightup publish pricing on its website?
No. The Lightup pricing page is a working page with a full two column feature comparison across plan limits, data quality indicators, incident detection, AI and automation, infrastructure, security, operations and integrations. Both the Cloud and Enterprise columns end in a Get Quote button and neither carries a dollar figure. The page states that all plans are annual subscriptions.
Is Lightup available on AWS Marketplace?
A search of AWS Marketplace in September 2026 returned no Lightup listing. That matters because the marketplace is where most of this category publishes an annual contract price: Monte Carlo, Sifflet, Bigeye, Datafold, Anomalo, Collibra, Elementary and Acceldata all have listings with a twelve month figure on the face of them. Without one, a Lightup quote has no public comparison point.
How many users are included in Lightup Cloud?
Ten. The Cloud plan is capped at 10 users and 2 workspaces, and both are listed as Custom on the Enterprise plan. The page does not say whether read-only viewers or service accounts consume a seat, or what happens when you cross ten mid-term, so ask for the overage mechanics in writing before you sign an annual commitment.
Does Lightup offer a monthly plan?
No. The pricing page states that all plans are annual subscriptions, for both Cloud and Enterprise. There is no published month to month option and no published self-serve checkout, so the shortest commitment on offer is twelve months. A sandbox and free trial are listed as available on the Cloud plan for evaluation before that commitment.
What is the difference between Lightup Cloud and Lightup Enterprise?
Cloud caps users at 10 and workspaces at 2, keeps 30 days of retention, ships community support and limited role based access control, covers Databricks partially, and has no catalog integrations. Enterprise makes users and workspaces custom, keeps 6 or more months of retention, adds SAML and Microsoft AD, full RBAC, query governance, hybrid deployment, scheduled export, a dedicated success manager, and Alation, Atlan and Collibra.
Does Lightup support Databricks?
Partially on the Cloud plan and fully on Enterprise. Lightup footnotes the split itself. Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Postgres and Athena are listed as available on both plans. If Databricks is your primary platform, get the specifics of what Partial excludes in writing, including Unity Catalog metadata, Delta Live Tables, streaming tables and SQL warehouse coverage.
What is a cheaper alternative to Lightup?
Anything with a published price is cheaper in the sense that matters, which is that you can check it before a sales call. Our Starter plan is 99 dollars a month billed yearly for up to 50 monitored tables and Scale is 799 for up to 1,500 with column level lineage, single sign-on and an audit log. Acceldata publishes a 10,000 dollar annual platform contract on AWS. Both numbers are public and testable.
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