Grafana vs Pushgateway
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
Pushgateway
Push acceptor for ephemeral and batch job metrics
| Feature | Grafana | Pushgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | ≈5-minute setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 100 · Excellent | 87 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 32 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 76,876 | ★ 3,369 |
| First released | 2014 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog | Datadog |
What are Grafana and Pushgateway?
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
Pushgateway
The Prometheus Pushgateway allows ephemeral and batch jobs to expose their metrics to Prometheus. Jobs push metrics to the gateway, which Prometheus then scrapes on its regular schedule.
- Accepts pushed metrics
- Bridges batch jobs to Prometheus
- Persists metrics to disk
- Tiny footprint
Grafana vs Pushgateway: key differences
Grafana is written in TypeScript, while Pushgateway is built with Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana versus Apache-2.0 for Pushgateway. Pushgateway is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 512 MB for Grafana. Grafana has the considerably larger community, at 76,876 GitHub stars versus 3,369.
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 Pushgateway if…
- Solves batch job monitoring
- Simple to run
Watch out for
- Not for high-frequency metrics
- Can become a single point of failure
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Pushgateway better?
Neither is universally better. Grafana has the larger community, while Pushgateway is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Grafana and Pushgateway free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Pushgateway under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana and Pushgateway with Docker?
Grafana: yes. Pushgateway: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Grafana or Pushgateway?
Pushgateway has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 512 MB for Grafana. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.