Grafana vs VictoriaMetrics

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?
FeatureGrafanaVictoriaMetrics
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptGo
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM512 MB256 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 17,488
First released20142018
ReplacesDatadogDatadog, Grafana Cloud

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

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

Choose VictoriaMetrics if…

  • Excellent compression and speed
  • Easy single-binary deployment
VictoriaMetrics details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or VictoriaMetrics 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 VictoriaMetrics free and open-source?

Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and VictoriaMetrics under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Grafana and VictoriaMetrics with Docker?

Grafana: yes. VictoriaMetrics: yes.

Related comparisons