Skip to content
BetterOpenSource

Grafana vs OpenTelemetry

A side-by-side comparison of two open-source tools to help you choose the right one.

Feature
SummaryDashboards and observability for everything.Vendor-neutral observability for every stack.
GitHub stars66K5.4K
LicenseAGPL 3.0Apache 2.0
LanguageGoGo
PricingFree & Open SourceFree & Open Source
Self-hostable
ReplacesDatadog, New RelicDatadog, New Relic
Rating4.7 / 54.8 / 5

Grafana features

  • 150+ data source integrations
  • Rich, interactive dashboards
  • Metrics, logs, and traces in one view
  • Flexible alerting
  • Plugins and templating

OpenTelemetry features

  • Unified SDKs for traces, metrics, and logs in 11+ languages
  • OpenTelemetry Collector — a vendor-agnostic pipeline daemon
  • Auto-instrumentation for popular frameworks (Express, Spring, Django…)
  • Exporters for Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, Grafana LGTM, and 50+ backends
  • W3C-standard trace context propagation across services

Grafanapros & cons

Pros

  • Industry-standard visualization
  • Huge ecosystem of data sources
  • Self-host the full experience

Cons

  • Full stack (Loki/Tempo) adds complexity
  • Dashboards take time to perfect

OpenTelemetrypros & cons

Pros

  • Zero vendor lock-in — switch backends without changing app code
  • CNCF-graduated project with massive adoption and community
  • Auto-instrumentation means minimal code changes

Cons

  • Collector setup and configuration has a learning curve
  • You still need a storage/visualization backend (e.g. Grafana + Tempo)

Command Palette

Search for a command to run...