Grafana vs Metabase
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Grafana with
choose an app… Uptime Kuma Netdata Superset Prometheus Portainer CE Umami PostHog CasaOS Glance What's Up Status Postiz Netron Glances Homepage SigNoz InfluxDB Grafana k6 Redash Grafana Loki Plausible Dashy Apache SkyWalking Beszel Dockge Jaeger Vector Matomo Kibana GoAccess OpenObserve Cube cAdvisor Telegraf VictoriaMetrics Zipkin Upptime Phlare Logstash Sampler Dashboard Thanos Druid Dozzle Pinpoint APM Unleash Node Exporter Fluentd OpenSearch Rybbit Gatus Grafana Pyroscope Homer Checkmate Healthchecks HyperDX Benphelps Homepage Heimdall Beszel Hub Alertmanager Graylog ntopng Scrutiny Fluent Bit Coroot OpenTelemetry Collector Hertzbeat Statup Status WatchYourLAN NetAlertX Pulse Monitor Zabbix Graphite Speedtest Tracker Cortex Blackbox Exporter Grafana Tempo Grafana Mimir Kener Parca LibreNMS Monitoror Errbit Uptrace mtail Grafana OnCall Redis Exporter Vmstat Exporter PostgreSQL Exporter Grafana Alloy collectd Pushgateway Robusta Cstate Karma Kafka Exporter MySQL Server Exporter Kapacitor Perses Checkmk Kuberhealthy Icinga 2 PHP Server Monitor SNMP Exporter Process Exporter Munin VictoriaLogs Elasticsearch Exporter Grafana Beyla Nagios Core NGINX Prometheus Exporter Statping-ng Bugsink Smokeping Vigil Cacti Mailrise Domain Locker Proxmox VE Exporter Oncall Peekaping OpenNMS Horizon Shinken ElastAlert 2 Grafana Faro Sensu Go Percona Monitoring and Management Icinga Web 2 Kuma Mieru JSON Exporter Smokeping Prober Argus Monitor Web PHP-FPM Exporter Cloudprober Ping Exporter Monika IPMI Exporter SQL Exporter smartctl Exporter Pandora FMS Community Thruk NetXMS Apache Exporter NUT Exporter Speedtest Exporter Monit Naemon Bytebot Watch Fail2Ban Webinterface Lunalytics Observium Phoenix Panel
Compare Metabase with
choose an app… Uptime Kuma Netdata Superset Prometheus Streamlit Umami PostHog Postiz Netron Glances InfluxDB Grafana k6 Redash Grafana Loki Plausible Apache SkyWalking Beszel Jaeger Vector Matomo Cube Druid Unleash Rybbit OpenReplay kepler.gl Highlight.io Fathom Lite Plausible Community Plus Evidence Flagsmith OpenPanel Lightdash Countly Community Edition GoatCounter Jitsu Ackee RudderStack Shynet Tianji Open Web Analytics Counterscale Vince Analytics Aptabase Litlyx Middleware Gramps Web Socioboard Shaper Swetrix Pirsch Counter.dev Selfhost Offen Fair Web Analytics Rakam Analytics Medama AWStats Daily Stars Explorer TelemetryDeck Self-Hosted EDA Liwan Abby Mixpost Prisme Analytics HitKeep ANALOG d8a.tech Statistics for Strava
Feature Grafana Metabase Category Monitoring & Status Web Analytics License AGPL-3.0 AGPL-3.0 Language TypeScript Clojure Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 2,048 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, helm docker, bare-metal, binary GitHub stars ★ 76,153 ★ 48,597 First released 2014 2015 Replaces Datadog Tableau, Looker
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana if… Beautiful flexible dashboards Broad data source support Strong community Grafana details Choose Metabase if… Released under the AGPL-3.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 48.6k GitHub stars Written in Clojure Metabase details
Frequently asked questions Is Grafana or Metabase 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 Metabase free and open-source? Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Metabase under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana and Metabase with Docker? Grafana: yes. Metabase: yes.