Grafana vs Graphite
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
VS
Graphite
Scalable real-time graphing and time series storage
| Feature | Grafana | Graphite |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | ≈5-minute setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 100 · Excellent | 72 · Good |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal, helm | docker, bare-metal, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 76,876 | ★ 6,119 |
| First released | 2014 | 2008 |
| Replaces | Datadog | Datadog |
What are Grafana and Graphite?
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
Graphite
Graphite is a monitoring tool that stores numeric time series data and renders graphs of it on demand. It consists of Carbon for metric ingestion, Whisper for storage, and a Django-based web app for visualization.
- Time series storage with Whisper
- On-demand graph rendering
- Plain-text metric protocol
- Widely supported by collectors
Grafana vs Graphite: key differences
Grafana is written in TypeScript, while Graphite is built with JavaScript. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana versus Apache-2.0 for Graphite. Graphite is the more established project (first released 2008), while Grafana arrived in 2014. Grafana has the considerably larger community, at 76,876 GitHub stars versus 6,119.
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana if…
- Beautiful flexible dashboards
- Broad data source support
- Strong community
Watch out for
- Not a data store itself
- Alerting can be complex
Choose Graphite if…
- Simple metric protocol
- Mature and stable
Watch out for
- Dated architecture
- Scaling requires extra components
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Graphite better?
Neither is universally better. Grafana has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Grafana and Graphite free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Graphite under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana and Graphite with Docker?
Grafana: yes. Graphite: yes.