Grafana k6 vs Karma

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?
FeatureGrafana k6Karma
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageGoTypeScript
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM256 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, binary, bare-metaldocker, binary
GitHub stars★ 31,211★ 2,674
First released20172017
ReplacesLoadRunner, BlazeMeterPagerDuty

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana k6 if…

  • Developer-friendly scripting
  • Great CI integration
Grafana k6 details

Choose Karma if…

  • Clear at-a-glance overview
  • Lightweight
Karma details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana k6 or Karma better?

Neither is universally better. Grafana k6 has the larger community, while Karma is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are Grafana k6 and Karma free and open-source?

Yes. Grafana k6 is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Karma under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Grafana k6 and Karma with Docker?

Grafana k6: yes. Karma: yes.

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