Cortex vs Grafana
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Grafana
Open observability dashboards and visualization
| Feature | Cortex | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | ≈5-minute setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 100 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go | TypeScript |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, bare-metal, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,865 | ★ 76,876 |
| First released | 2016 | 2014 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Grafana Cloud | Datadog |
What are Cortex and Grafana?
Cortex
Cortex provides a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term store for Prometheus metrics. It offers a single API endpoint for querying and writing time series data across clusters.
- Multi-tenant metrics storage
- Horizontally scalable
- Prometheus-compatible API
- Long-term retention
Grafana
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that builds dashboards from many data sources. It targets operators and analysts who need rich observability dashboards. It is deployed via Docker, packages, or Helm.
- Dashboards from many data sources
- Alerting and annotations
- Large plugin ecosystem
- Templating and variables
Cortex vs Grafana: key differences
Cortex is written in Go, while Grafana is built with TypeScript. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Cortex versus AGPL-3.0 for Grafana. Grafana is the lighter option, starting around 512 MB of RAM against 1,024 MB for Cortex. Grafana is the more established project (first released 2014), while Cortex arrived in 2016. Grafana has the considerably larger community, at 76,876 GitHub stars versus 5,865.
Why pick each one
Choose Cortex if…
- Built for very large scale
- True multi-tenancy
Watch out for
- Operationally heavy
- Overkill for small setups
Choose Grafana if…
- Beautiful flexible dashboards
- Broad data source support
- Strong community
Watch out for
- Not a data store itself
- Alerting can be complex
Frequently asked questions
Is Cortex or Grafana better?
Grafana is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Cortex if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Cortex and Grafana free and open-source?
Yes. Cortex is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Grafana under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cortex and Grafana with Docker?
Cortex: yes. Grafana: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Cortex or Grafana?
Grafana has the smaller minimum footprint at 512 MB of RAM, compared to about 1,024 MB for Cortex. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.