Grafana Alloy vs Process Exporter

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? Compare Grafana Alloy with Compare Process Exporter with

Grafana Alloy OpenTelemetry collector distribution for all telemetry VS PR Process Exporter Prometheus exporter for per-process metrics

Feature	Grafana Alloy	Process Exporter
Deploy effort	Under-an-hour setup	Under-an-hour setup
Health score	88 · Excellent	25 · At risk
Category	Monitoring & Status	Monitoring & Status
License	Apache-2.0	MIT
Language	Go	Go
Setup difficulty	Medium	Medium
Min. RAM	128 MB	64 MB
Deployment	docker, kubernetes, binary	docker, binary
GitHub stars	★ 3,553	★ 2,155
First released	2024	2016
Replaces	Datadog Agent	Datadog Agent

What are Grafana Alloy and Process Exporter?

Grafana Alloy

Grafana Alloy is a vendor-neutral distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector that gathers logs, metrics, traces, and profiles. It uses a programmable configuration language to build flexible telemetry pipelines.

Unified telemetry collection
OpenTelemetry compatible
Programmable pipelines
Built-in clustering

Read the full Grafana Alloy guide →

Process Exporter

process-exporter exposes per-process and per-process-group CPU, memory, and IO metrics for Prometheus. It enables fine-grained resource attribution on busy hosts.

Per-process metrics
Process group aggregation
CPU, memory, IO data
Prometheus compatible

Grafana Alloy vs Process Exporter: key differences

Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Grafana Alloy versus MIT for Process Exporter. Process Exporter is the lighter option, starting around 64 MB of RAM against 128 MB for Grafana Alloy. Process Exporter is the more established project (first released 2016), while Grafana Alloy arrived in 2024.

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana Alloy if…

One agent for all signals
Strong Grafana integration

Watch out for

New project replacing Agent
Config language to learn

Grafana Alloy details

Choose Process Exporter if…

Released under the MIT license
First-class Docker support for quick deployment
Active community (2.2k GitHub stars)
Written in Go

Process Exporter details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana Alloy or Process Exporter better?

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

Are Grafana Alloy and Process Exporter free and open-source?

Yes. Grafana Alloy is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Process Exporter under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Grafana Alloy and Process Exporter with Docker?

Grafana Alloy: yes. Process Exporter: yes.

Which is lighter on resources, Grafana Alloy or Process Exporter?

Process Exporter has the smaller minimum footprint at 64 MB of RAM, compared to about 128 MB for Grafana Alloy. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.