Glances 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?
FeatureGlancesGrafana
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseLGPL-3.0AGPL-3.0
LanguagePythonTypeScript
Setup difficultyEasyMedium
Min. RAM128 MB512 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, binarydocker, bare-metal, helm
GitHub stars★ 33,269★ 76,153
First released20122014
ReplacesDatadogDatadog

Why pick each one

Choose Glances if…

  • Very easy to run
  • Lightweight
  • Good single-host overview
Glances details

Choose Grafana if…

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

Frequently asked questions

Is Glances or Grafana better?

Neither is universally better. Grafana has the larger community, while Glances is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are Glances and Grafana free and open-source?

Yes. Glances is licensed under LGPL-3.0 and Grafana under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Glances and Grafana with Docker?

Glances: yes. Grafana: yes.

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