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Grafana VS Putback

Compare Grafana VS Putback and see what are their differences

Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Rating
0 reviews
Pricing
Open source
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Alternatives Is it good?
Putback

Putback is a Mac window manager that puts every window back where it was when your displays change, and switches named layouts with one hotkey.

Rating
0 reviews
Pricing
Paid Free trial $19 / One-off (1 Mac. Family 5 Macs $29, Team 20 Macs $79)
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Alternatives Is it good?
DaytaBrain
DaytaBrain is your AI strategy partner: it keeps strategy and execution connected, warns leaders when initiatives drift, recommends the next decision and learns from the results. The 20 to 60 hours per cycle spent on reports? Gone. sponsored
Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Which is more popular?

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be more popular. It has been mentioned 260 times since March 2021.

social mentions
260 vs 0
Monitoring Tools popularity
100% vs 0%
alternatives listed
240+ vs 17

Base details

Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.

Grafana
Putback
Website grafana.com putback.app
Pricing
Open source
Paid Free trial $19 / One-off (1 Mac. Family 5 Macs $29, Team 20 Macs $79) Official pricing
Platforms —
Mac
Company Startup from the United States · 100 - 249 employees · 2014 Startup from Australia · 1 - 9 employees · 2026
Listed in
Data Dashboard Data Visualization Data Analytics Monitoring Tools Application Performance Monitoring +2
Window Manager OSX Window Manager Mac Tools OSX Tools Productivity Menu Bar Apps +3

About Grafana and Putback

In their own words, as submitted to SaaSHub.

Grafana
Putback

No description of Grafana yet.

Every time your display setup changes, macOS moves your windows and does not move them back. Undock from a monitor and everything piles onto the laptop screen. Dock again and it stays piled. Putback is a menu bar window manager for macOS that fixes this. It learns where your windows sit while you...

Read more about Putback

Features and specs

What each product offers, as listed by its team.

Grafana 6 features
Putback 8 features
  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.
  • Restores windows on display change
    Puts every window back on the screen and in the position it came from when you dock, undock or plug in a monitor.
  • A memory for every desk
    Keeps a separate layout for each display setup: laptop only, desk with a monitor, office dock.
  • Scenes with one hotkey
    Name any arrangement as a Scene and switch to it with a single hotkey.
  • Scene Studio
    Draw a desk with a box for each app, even apps that are not open yet, plus a wallpaper per Scene.
  • Triggers
    Apply a Scene by time or calendar, like Coding at 9am or Meeting for a video call. Off by default.
  • Stash
    Tucks every window aside with one shortcut, then brings them all back exactly where they were.
  • Undo and history
    Undo the whole desk, and see every restore with the reason it happened.
  • Private, no account
    Window data never leaves your Mac. One-time purchase, no subscription, signed and notarized.

Analysis

An editorial look at what each product does well and who it suits.

Grafana
Putback

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Grafana is generally considered to be a good choice for users looking for a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly data visualization tool. Its ability to integrate with numerous data sources and its rich feature set make it a popular choice among developers, engineers, and IT operations teams.

Why this product is good

  • Grafana is widely regarded as a robust and versatile open-source data visualization and monitoring platform. It supports a wide range of data sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and many others, making it highly adaptable for various use cases. Grafana's intuitive and interactive dashboards allow users to visually track the performance and health of their system in real-time, enhance operational efficiency, and facilitate better decision-making. Its strong community support, frequent updates, and rich plugin ecosystem further contribute to its reputation as a reliable tool for monitoring and analytics.

Recommended for

    Grafana is particularly recommended for IT professionals, data analysts, and engineers who need to monitor and visualize large datasets in real-time. It's ideal for organizations running complex systems or applications that require comprehensive monitoring to ensure uptime and performance are maintained. Additionally, Grafana is suitable for teams that value open-source solutions and require a platform that can integrate with multiple data sources and adapt to various monitoring needs.

Overall verdict

  • Putback is a niche app designed to help resellers and organizers track items that need to be returned to their proper place, which can be genuinely useful for people managing inventory, decluttering, or reselling goods, though its value depends heavily on your specific workflow needs and how well it integrates with tools you already use.

Why this product is good

  • Helps maintain organization by tracking items that need to be put back or returned
  • Can save time by reducing the need to remember or manually log misplaced items
  • Useful for resellers who need to track inventory location and status
  • Simple, focused functionality without unnecessary feature bloat

Recommended for

  • Resellers managing physical inventory across multiple locations
  • People decluttering or organizing home spaces who need a tracking system
  • Small business owners who need lightweight inventory location tracking
  • Users who prefer simple single-purpose apps over complex all-in-one solutions

Videos

Walkthroughs and reviews on video.

Grafana 3 videos + Add
Putback 0 videos + Add

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos

  • - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

No Putback videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Category popularity

How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.

Score bands 0–20 21–40 41–50 51–60 61–100
Grafana
Putback
100% 100%
Monitoring Tools
0% 0%
0% 0%
OSX Tools
100% 100%
100% 100%
Data Dashboard
0% 0%
0% 0%
Mac Tools
100% 100%

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing Grafana and Putback.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

Putback's answer:

Mac users who move between display setups: a MacBook that docks to a monitor at the desk, a second screen at the office, a laptop on the couch. Developers, designers and anyone who runs a lot of windows and is tired of putting them back by hand every morning.

What makes your product unique?

Putback's answer:

Most Mac window managers snap windows into place when you ask. Putback remembers. It learns where your windows sit while you work, keeps a separate memory for every display setup, and puts everything back when that setup returns. Named Scenes, drawn in Scene Studio and switched with one hotkey, turn any arrangement into something you can recall in a second.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Putback's answer:

Rectangle and Magnet are great at snapping a window to half the screen, and Putback runs happily alongside them. Choose Putback if your problem is that your windows get scrambled every time you dock, undock or plug in a monitor, or if you want whole desks you can switch between with a hotkey. It is a one-time purchase with a 7 day free trial, no account, and your window data never leaves your Mac. On first launch it even checks your Mission Control settings and tells you if the free macOS fix is enough before you pay.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Putback's answer:

A native macOS app in Swift and SwiftUI, using the macOS Accessibility API to move windows and Sparkle for updates. Licensing and the website run on Cloudflare (Workers, D1 and Pages).

What's the story behind your product?

Putback's answer:

Putback launched in July 2026 with a simple pitch: unplug your MacBook and macOS piles every window onto one screen. The launch post passed 60,000 views and the replies split down the middle, half saying "I've needed this for years" and half saying "my Mac already does this." So we went and found out. The real answer is two Mission Control settings most people never touch, and we published that free fix ourselves. Even with those settings, restores still fail when a dock reconnects slowly or an app resists being moved, and nothing in macOS remembers more than one desk or lets you name a layout. That gap is Putback. About half of its first features came straight from those launch replies.

User comments

Share your experience with using Grafana and Putback. For example, how are they different and which one is better?

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Reviews and articles

External articles and on-site reviews we used to compare the two products.

Grafana no reviews yet
Putback no reviews yet
  • Self Hosting Like Its 2025
    kiranet.org · Apr 2025

    If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services...

  • Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
    middleware.io · Feb 2024

    Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though it’s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating...

  • Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
    signoz.io · Jan 2024

    Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for...

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We have no reviews of Putback yet. Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.

Grafana 260 mentions
Putback 0 mentions

View more

Tracking Putback since Jul 2026.

Alternatives to Grafana and Putback

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