Cacti vs Hosted Graphite: What are the differences?

Developers describe Cacti as "Cacti stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database". Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. On the other hand, Hosted Graphite is detailed as "Graphite as a service". Hosted Graphite is the powerful open-source application metrics system used by hundreds of companies. We take away the headaches of scaling, maintenance, and upgrades and let you do what you do best - write great software.

Cacti and Hosted Graphite belong to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Cacti are:

• Unlimited number of graph items can be defined for each graph optionally utilizing CDEFs or data sources from within cacti.
• Automatic grouping of GPRINT graph items to AREA, STACK, and LINE[1-3] to allow for quick re-sequencing of graph items.
• Auto-Padding support to make sure graph legend text lines up.

On the other hand, Hosted Graphite provides the following key features:

• Dashboards- Standard Graphite and Tasseo dashboards out of the box
• Account Sharing- Allow team members to customise graphs and dashboards
• Access Keys- Export data to external monitoring systems, dashboards and alerting systems

"Free" is the top reason why over 2 developers like Cacti, while over 3 developers mention "Great customer support" as the leading cause for choosing Hosted Graphite.