Alertmanager vs Grafana OnCall
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Alertmanager
Handles alerts from Prometheus with routing and silencing
VS
Grafana OnCall
Open-source on-call management and incident escalation
| Feature | Alertmanager | Grafana OnCall |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go | Python |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | docker, kubernetes, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 8,572 | ★ 3,889 |
| First released | 2015 | 2021 |
| Replaces | PagerDuty, Opsgenie | PagerDuty, Opsgenie |
Why pick each one
Frequently asked questions
Is Alertmanager or Grafana OnCall better?
Neither is universally better. Alertmanager has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Alertmanager and Grafana OnCall free and open-source?
Yes. Alertmanager is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Grafana OnCall under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Alertmanager and Grafana OnCall with Docker?
Alertmanager: yes. Grafana OnCall: yes.