Grafana vs Portainer CE

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?
FeatureGrafanaPortainer CE
CategoryMonitoring & StatusDashboards & Startpages
LicenseAGPL-3.0Zlib
LanguageTypeScriptTypeScript
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM512 MB256 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 38,184
First released20142016
ReplacesDatadogRancher, Docker Desktop

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose Portainer CE if…

  • Very beginner-friendly
  • Broad orchestrator support
Portainer CE details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or Portainer CE better?

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

Are Grafana and Portainer CE free and open-source?

Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Portainer CE under Zlib. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Grafana and Portainer CE with Docker?

Grafana: yes. Portainer CE: yes.

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