Karma vs Sensu Go
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Karma | Sensu Go |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 87 · Excellent | 82 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, binary | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 2,679 | ★ 1,112 |
| First released | 2017 | 2018 |
| Replaces | PagerDuty | Datadog, PagerDuty |
What are Karma and Sensu Go?
Karma
Karma is a web dashboard that aggregates and displays alerts from one or more Alertmanager instances. It provides grouping, filtering, and silencing in a single clean view for on-call engineers.
- Multi-Alertmanager aggregation
- Alert grouping and filtering
- Inline silence management
- Auto-refreshing display
Sensu Go
Sensu Go is a monitoring event pipeline that treats monitoring as code. It collects check results from agents, processes them through filters and handlers, and integrates with metrics and alerting backends.
- Monitoring as code workflow
- Event filtering and handlers
- Agent and agentless checks
- Built-in metrics support
Karma vs Sensu Go: key differences
Karma is written in TypeScript, while Sensu Go is built with Go. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Karma versus MIT for Sensu Go. Karma is the lighter option, starting around 64 MB of RAM against 512 MB for Sensu Go. Karma has the considerably larger community, at 2,679 GitHub stars versus 1,112.
Why pick each one
Choose Karma if…
- Clear at-a-glance overview
- Lightweight
Watch out for
- Read-mostly view
- Requires Alertmanager
Choose Sensu Go if…
- Declarative configuration
- Flexible event pipeline
Watch out for
- Smaller community after acquisition
- Concepts take time to learn
Frequently asked questions
Is Karma or Sensu Go better?
Karma is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Sensu Go if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Karma and Sensu Go free and open-source?
Yes. Karma is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Sensu Go under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Karma and Sensu Go with Docker?
Karma: yes. Sensu Go: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Karma or Sensu Go?
Karma has the smaller minimum footprint at 64 MB of RAM, compared to about 512 MB for Sensu Go. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.