Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Netdata VS Grafana

Compare Netdata VS Grafana and see what are their differences

Netdata logo Netdata

Monitor your servers, containers, and applications, in high-resolution and in real-time.

Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases
  • Netdata Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-02-16

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It is designed to run on all physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters, and edge/IoT devices, to monitor your systems, containers & applications.

Scales nicely from a single server to thousands of servers, even in complex multi/mixed/hybrid cloud environments & given enough disk space it can keep your metrics for years.

KEY FEATURES:

💥 Collects metrics from 800+ integrations OS metrics, container metrics, VMs, hardware sensors, apps metrics, OpenMetrics exporters, StatsD & logs.

💪 Real-Time, Low-Latency, High-Resolution All metrics are collected per second & are on the dashboard immediately after data collection. Netdata is fast.

😶‍🌫️ Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Trains multiple ML models for each metric collected & detects anomalies based on the past behavior of each metric individually.

🔥 Powerful Visualization Clear & precise visualization that allows you to quickly understand any dataset, but also to filter, slice & dice the data directly on the dashboard, without the need to learn any query language.

🔔 Out of box Alerts Hundreds of alerts out of the box to detect common issues & pitfalls, revealing issues that can easily go unnoticed. It supports several notification methods to let you know when your attention is needed.

📖 systemd Journal Logs Explorer (BETA - nightly release channel) Provides a systemd journal logs explorer, to view, filter & analyze system & apps logs by directly accessing systemd journal files on individual hosts & infrastructure-wide logs centralization servers.

😎 Low Maintenance Fully automated in every aspect: automated dashboards, out-of-the-box alerts, auto-detection & discovery of metrics, zero-touch ML, easy scalability, high availability &CI/CD friendly.

⭐ Open & Extensible Netdata is a modular platform that can be extended in all possible ways and it also integrates nicely with other monitoring solutions.

  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Netdata

$ Details
freemium $3.0 / Monthly (Netdata Pro, $3 /Node /mo - Netdata Business, $4 /Node /mo )
Platforms
Linux Docker AWS Azure Mac OSX Cloud Windows Edge NGINX Oracle
Release Date
2018 June

Grafana

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
Platforms
-
Release Date
2014 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
New York
City
New York
Founder(s)
Anthony Woods
Employees
100 - 249

Netdata features and specs

  • Dashboards & visualizations
    Digestible, intuitive, and visually appealing charts for troubleshooting.
  • Configurable
    Zero configuration. Zero maintenance. No preparations. Sane defaults. Auto-detection for all metrics. Immediately usable.
  • Metrics
    Netdata collects, stores and visualizes all the metrics available. We almost never filter out metrics. The more metrics, the better.
  • Real time monitoring
    Netdata is real-time. It collects all metrics every second and it has a data collection to visualization latency of less than a millisecond.
  • Analytics and Reporting
    Detailed analysis on how applications and systems are performing

Grafana features and specs

  • 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 of Grafana

  • 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.

Netdata videos

Install Netdata on Linux in two minutes

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Netdata's standard dashboard

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Netdata and Grafana)
Monitoring Tools
12 12%
88% 88
Performance Monitoring
24 24%
76% 76
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
13 13%
87% 87

User comments

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

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Netdata and Grafana

Netdata Reviews

The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
Netdata gives you access to sublime real-time health and performance monitoring for all your systems. The Netdata GitHub community has made its growth abundantly clear throughout its last six years of active development.
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
Netdata provides unparalleled real-time health monitoring and performance troubleshooting for systems and applications. Over the past six years of development, Netdata’s GitHub community has been essential to its growth.
Source: geekflare.com
4 Best Open Source Dashboard Monitoring Tools In 2019
“Pull” method : you can set Netdata to run on individual nodes and plug your dashboards directly to it. This way, you can scale your node to your needs and you are not concerned about the scaling of different nodes. Also, storage is scoped to what’s really needed by a particular node thus more efficient;

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 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 and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 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 your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [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 visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since you’ve landed yourself here, I’m guessing that you’re one of those people. Fear not! We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafana’s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be a lot more popular than Netdata. While we know about 238 links to Grafana, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Netdata. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Netdata mentions (5)

  • Trying to decide best practices for production environment
    Pros are instant HA and Migration. Cons are huge bandwidth hits. With your 4x1gbe you would be maxed out on replicating those 25 VMs. You wouldn't have anything for users. I have a test lab with 4 nodes, 22cpu 100gbram and 30tb space, using low end stuff, 12hdds. Proxmox, ceph dashboard, (the native ceph dashboard you can turn on), and a netdata.cloud account. So I watch it like a hawk and like to load test. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Reducing the maintenance surface area of hosting a small internal app
    Docker-compose, not k8s. Set up a script to update the OS, pull all your containers and reboot after hours once a week or once a day. Make sure the script specifies non interactive. Set up alerting for low disk space, see https://netdata.cloud or use your own tool. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • What’s your preferred stack?
    There can be some issues if you mix and match elastic versions, wazuh versions, logstash versions. But the documentation guides you very well with matrix of what is and is not compatible. You will want a beefy VM to run it in, I started smaller than I should of, and after running a while it kind of puked on itself, certain things would randomly stop working. After giving it 32GB RAM, plenty of disk 4TB, and 8... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Netdata on MacOS
    $ brew info netdata Netdata: stable 1.29.3 (bottled) Diagnose infrastructure problems with metrics, visualizations & alarms Https://netdata.cloud/ Not installed From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/netdata.rb License: GPL-3.0-or-later ==> Dependencies Build: autoconf ✘, automake ✘, pkg-config ✔ Required: json-c ✘, libuv ✘, lz4 ✘, openssl@1.1 ✔ ==> Caveats To start netdata: brew... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Netdata cloud and data control
    What I know is that each node's data is still primarily stored on the node itself, and I've figured that the Registry used by Netdata cloud stores only URLs and randomly generated UUIDs. So my question is, will any other data be stored outside of my nodes? Does Netdata Cloud have access to my servers 24/7 or only when I got a browser tab with Netdata cloud open? Is there more information on security and data... Source: about 4 years ago

Grafana mentions (238)

  • Send Node.js logs from Docker to Grafana Cloud with Alloy
    Navigate to Grafana Cloud and sign up or log in. In the sidebar, select Connections → Add new connection, select Loki. This is the place that prompts you to set up your Loki connection and allows you to generate an access token for Alloy. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • How to Optimize Your Fintech API in 2025: A Guide
    Prometheus: This open-source monitoring solution pairs with Grafana for powerful custom visualization of exactly what matters to your business. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • Monitoring Docker Hub limits with Prometheus
    Grafana Is used to visualize metrics, logs, traces, and by the time you read this probably other things 😄. - Source: dev.to / 15 days ago
  • 3 Types of Chaos Experiments and How To Run Them
    Utilize monitoring solutions like Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog to monitor how services communicate under normal and failure conditions. Service meshes like Istio or Linkerd can provide detailed insights without changing your application code. - Source: dev.to / 17 days ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Netdata and Grafana, you can also consider the following products

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!