Grafana vs Graphite: What are the differences?
Developers describe Grafana as "Open source Graphite & InfluxDB Dashboard and Graph Editor". Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins. On the other hand, Graphite is detailed as "A highly scalable real-time graphing system". Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand.
Grafana and Graphite can be primarily classified as "Monitoring" tools.
Some of the features offered by Grafana are:
- Create, edit, save & search dashboards
- Change column spans and row heights
- Drag and drop panels to rearrange
On the other hand, Graphite provides the following key features:
- carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data
- whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD)
- graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo
"Beautiful" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Grafana, while over 14 developers mention "Render any graph" as the leading cause for choosing Graphite.
Grafana and Graphite are both open source tools. It seems that Grafana with 29.3K GitHub stars and 5.55K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Graphite with 4.58K GitHub stars and 1.2K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Grafana has a broader approval, being mentioned in 559 company stacks & 313 developers stacks; compared to Graphite, which is listed in 97 company stacks and 20 developer stacks.
