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.

Not the right match-up?
FeatureGrafanaPushgateway
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptGo
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM512 MB32 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, kubernetes, binary
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 3,356
First released20142015
ReplacesDatadogDatadog

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose Pushgateway if…

  • Solves batch job monitoring
  • Simple to run
Pushgateway details

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.

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