Grafana vs SigNoz

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

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FeatureGrafanaSigNoz
CategoryMonitoring & StatusDeveloper Tools & Git
LicenseAGPL-3.0MIT
LanguageTypeScriptTypeScript
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM512 MB4,096 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 31,790
First released20142021
ReplacesDatadogDatadog, New Relic

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose SigNoz if…

  • Released under the MIT license
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Kubernetes-ready with Helm charts available
  • Mature project with 31.8k GitHub stars
SigNoz details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or SigNoz 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 SigNoz free and open-source?

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

Can I run Grafana and SigNoz with Docker?

Grafana: yes. SigNoz: yes.

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