Alertmanager vs Grafana

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?
FeatureAlertmanagerGrafana
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0AGPL-3.0
LanguageGoTypeScript
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM64 MB512 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, binarydocker, bare-metal, helm
GitHub stars★ 8,572★ 76,153
First released20152014
ReplacesPagerDuty, OpsgenieDatadog

Why pick each one

Choose Alertmanager if…

  • Powerful routing logic
  • Standard in the Prometheus stack
Alertmanager details

Choose Grafana if…

  • Beautiful flexible dashboards
  • Broad data source support
  • Strong community
Grafana details

Frequently asked questions

Is Alertmanager or Grafana better?

Neither is universally better. Grafana has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Alertmanager and Grafana free and open-source?

Yes. Alertmanager is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Grafana under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Alertmanager and Grafana with Docker?

Alertmanager: yes. Grafana: yes.

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