Grafana OnCall 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?
Grafana OnCall
Open-source on-call management and incident escalation
VS
Karma
Alert dashboard for Prometheus Alertmanager
| Feature | Grafana OnCall | Karma |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Python | TypeScript |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 3,889 | ★ 2,674 |
| First released | 2021 | 2017 |
| Replaces | PagerDuty, Opsgenie | PagerDuty |
Why pick each one
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana OnCall or Karma better?
Neither is universally better. Grafana OnCall 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 OnCall and Karma free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana OnCall 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 OnCall and Karma with Docker?
Grafana OnCall: yes. Karma: yes.