Grafana
Hasura
| Feature | Grafana | Hasura |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $99/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.4 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | backend-developers, startups, api-developers, full-stack-teams |
| Founded | 2014 | 2017 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Graphql Api | ✗ | ✓ |
| Rest Api | ✗ | ✓ |
| Real Time | ✗ | ✓ |
| Authorization | ✗ | ✓ |
| Event Triggers | ✗ | ✓ |
| Remote Schemas | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ Grafana Pros
- Connects to virtually any data source
- Beautiful and highly customizable dashboards
- Open-source with massive community
- Grafana Cloud includes Loki, Tempo, and Mimir
- Alerting across all data sources
✗ Grafana Cons
- Self-hosting requires DevOps expertise
- Dashboard creation has a learning curve
- Plugin quality varies
✓ Hasura Pros
- Instant APIs
- Real-time subscriptions
- Great developer experience
- Performance
✗ Hasura Cons
- PostgreSQL-focused
- Complex authorization
- Pricing changes
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. Hasura targets backend developers and startups and leads with graphql-api and rest-api.
On pricing, Grafana is the clear winner for budget-conscious users — starting at $29/mo compared to $99/mo for Hasura. That $70/mo difference adds up quickly for growing teams.
Both offer free plans, so you can test each with your real workflow before committing to a subscription.
Feature-wise, Grafana offers broader built-in capabilities (8 features vs 6), while Hasura takes a more focused approach — which can mean a simpler, faster onboarding experience.
This is a genuinely close comparison. If you can, sign up for both free trials (where available) and run a one-week test with your actual team tasks before deciding.