Alternatives to Grafana
The dashboards standard
Grafana ranks #5 of 9 in Infrastructure monitoring, with an Alt Score of 86. It is licensed under AGPL-3.0, freemium from $19/month and available on Linux and Web. 10 of 10 checklist rows are verified against a public source.
IT teams, SREs, and developers who need to monitor infrastructure, applications, and systems by visualizing metrics, logs, and traces from multiple data sources.
An open-source platform for building interactive dashboards that query and display data from sources like Prometheus, Loki, and hundreds of databases and monitoring tools. Supports alerting, annotations, and mixing multiple data sources on a single dashboard. Available self-hosted or as managed Grafana Cloud with additional integrated services (Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics).
You connect one or more data sources via plugins, then build dashboards using panels that query those sources and render the results as graphs, tables, or other visualizations. Dashboards can be shared, version-controlled, and configured with alert rules that trigger notifications based on query conditions.
Why people leave Grafana
Dashed reasons are sourced facts; the rest are opinions. Vendors can dispute.
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Ranked alternatives
Ordered by Alt Score. Click any score to see the breakdown.
Feature comparison
Rows come from the Infrastructure monitoring checklist (14 rows). Human-verified cells only. ? means the value has not been verified.
| Infrastructure monitoring checklist | Grafana | checkmk | Netdata | New Relic | Datadog | Icinga |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | ||||||
| Starts at | ||||||
| License | ||||||
| Platforms | ||||||
| Metrics collection | ||||||
| Dashboards | ||||||
| Alerting rules | ||||||
| Log aggregation | ||||||
| Tracing / APM | ||||||
| Self-hostable | ||||||
| Agent footprint | ||||||
| Integrations count | ||||||
| Free tier limits | ||||||
| High-availability setup |
Every fact and feature listed for Grafana is verified against its own pages. Each alternative is sourced on its own page.
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Pricing model Freemium verified 2026-07-10
Always $0
https://grafana.com/pricing/ -
License AGPL-3.0 verified 2026-07-10
GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 19 November 2007
https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/main/LICENSE -
Starts at $19/month verified 2026-07-10
From $19 / month + usage with volume discounts
https://grafana.com/pricing/ -
Platforms Linux, Web verified 2026-07-10
Grafana supports the following operating systems: - Debian or Ubuntu - RHEL or Fedora - SUSE or openSUSE - macOS - Windows
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/installation/ -
Status active verified 2026-07-10
v13.1.0 ... 01 Jul 15:18
https://github.com/grafana/grafana/releases -
Metrics collection Partial verified 2026-07-10
Grafana Alloy is a vendor-neutral distribution of the OTel Collector
https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/ -
Dashboards Yes verified 2026-07-10
Dashboards allow you to query, transform, visualize, and understand your data no matter where it's stored.
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/ -
Alerting rules Yes verified 2026-07-10
Grafana Alerting allows you to learn about problems in your systems moments after they occur.
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/alerting/ -
Log aggregation Partial verified 2026-07-10
Grafana Loki is a set of open source components that can be composed into a fully featured logging stack.
https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/ -
Tracing / APM Partial verified 2026-07-10
Grafana Tempo is an open-source, easy-to-use, and high-scale distributed tracing backend.
https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest/ -
Self-hostable Yes verified 2026-07-10
Grafana supports the following operating systems: - Debian or Ubuntu - RHEL or Fedora - SUSE or openSUSE - macOS - Windows
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/installation/ -
Agent footprint Yes verified 2026-07-10
Grafana Alloy is a vendor-neutral distribution of the OTel Collector
https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/ -
Integrations count Yes verified 2026-07-10
Grafana comes bundled with core data source plugins (like Prometheus, Loki, and MySQL), and hundreds more are available in the plugin catalog.
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/datasources/concepts/ -
Free tier limits Yes verified 2026-07-10
Limited to 10k active series per month
https://grafana.com/pricing/ -
High-availability setup Yes verified 2026-07-10
Grafana uses an embedded sqlite3 database to store users, dashboards, and other persistent data by default. For high availability, you must use a shared database to store this data.
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/set-up-for-high-availability/
FAQ
Yes. checkmk, Zabbix and Nagios have a free tier or are fully free. Free-tier limits in the comparison table are verified and dated.
checkmk, Netdata and Icinga — every license claim links its source.