Grafana
Infisical
| Feature | Grafana | Infisical |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $6/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.5 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | development-teams, devops-engineers, startups, security-conscious-organizations |
| Founded | 2014 | 2022 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Secret Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Env Sync | ✗ | ✓ |
| Audit Logs | ✗ | ✓ |
| Access Control | ✗ | ✓ |
| Auto Rotation | ✗ | ✓ |
| Integrations | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self Hostable | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ 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
✓ Infisical Pros
- Open-source with free self-hosting option
- Syncs secrets to any platform (Vercel, AWS, K8s, etc.)
- Point-in-time secret recovery (version history)
- Auto-rotation of secrets and certificates
✗ Infisical Cons
- Younger project than HashiCorp Vault
- Self-hosted requires infrastructure management
- Enterprise features gated behind paid plans
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. Infisical targets development teams and devops engineers and leads with secret-management and env-sync.
On pricing, Infisical is the clear winner for budget-conscious users — starting at $6/mo compared to $29/mo for Grafana. That $23/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 7), while Infisical 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.