Grafana vs Uptrace
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
Uptrace
OpenTelemetry-based tracing, metrics, and logs tool
| Feature | Grafana | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | ≈5-minute setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 100 · Excellent | 88 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSL-1.1 |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 76,876 | ★ 4,290 |
| First released | 2014 | 2021 |
| Replaces | Datadog | Datadog, New Relic |
What are Grafana and Uptrace?
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
Uptrace
Uptrace is an open-source observability tool that uses OpenTelemetry to collect distributed traces, metrics, and logs. It stores data in ClickHouse and provides a clean UI for analyzing application performance.
- Distributed tracing
- Metrics and logs support
- ClickHouse storage
- OpenTelemetry-native
Grafana vs Uptrace: key differences
Grafana is written in TypeScript, while Uptrace is built with Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana versus BSL-1.1 for Uptrace. Grafana is the more established project (first released 2014), while Uptrace arrived in 2021. Grafana has the considerably larger community, at 76,876 GitHub stars versus 4,290.
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 Uptrace if…
- Efficient ClickHouse backend
- Easy to deploy
Watch out for
- BSL license restrictions
- Smaller community
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Uptrace 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 Uptrace free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Uptrace under BSL-1.1. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana and Uptrace with Docker?
Grafana: yes. Uptrace: yes.