Grafana vs Homer

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

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FeatureGrafanaHomer
CategoryMonitoring & StatusDashboards & Startpages
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptVue
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM512 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, bare-metal
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 11,537
First released20142019
ReplacesDatadogHeimdall

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose Homer if…

  • Extremely lightweight
  • Trivial to host
  • Fast
Homer details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or Homer better?

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

Are Grafana and Homer free and open-source?

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

Can I run Grafana and Homer with Docker?

Grafana: yes. Homer: yes.

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