Grafana vs Robusta

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

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FeatureGrafanaRobusta
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0MIT
LanguageTypeScriptPython
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM512 MB256 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmkubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 3,072
First released20142021
ReplacesDatadogDatadog, PagerDuty

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose Robusta if…

  • Makes alerts actionable
  • Strong Kubernetes focus
Robusta details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or Robusta 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 Robusta free and open-source?

Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Robusta under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Grafana and Robusta with Docker?

Grafana: yes. Robusta: check the project docs for container support.

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