Grafana vs Telegraf

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?
FeatureGrafanaTelegraf
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0MIT
LanguageTypeScriptGo
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM512 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, kubernetes, binary
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 17,736
First released20142015
ReplacesDatadogDatadog Agent

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose Telegraf if…

  • Huge plugin catalog
  • Trivial to deploy
Telegraf details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or Telegraf better?

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

Are Grafana and Telegraf free and open-source?

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

Can I run Grafana and Telegraf with Docker?

Grafana: yes. Telegraf: yes.

Related comparisons