Grafana vs Parca

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?
FeatureGrafanaParca
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptTypeScript
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM512 MB256 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, kubernetes, binary
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 4,935
First released20142021
ReplacesDatadogDatadog Profiler

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose Parca if…

  • No code changes needed
  • Low overhead
Parca details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or Parca 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 Parca free and open-source?

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

Can I run Grafana and Parca with Docker?

Grafana: yes. Parca: yes.

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