Grafana
osTicket
| Feature | Grafana | osTicket |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $12/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | small-businesses, budget-conscious-teams, self-hosted-advocates, it-departments |
| Founded | 2014 | 2003 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Ticket Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Email Piping | ✗ | ✓ |
| Custom Fields | ✗ | ✓ |
| Sla Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Agent Collision Avoidance | ✗ | ✓ |
| Knowledge Base | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ 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
✓ osTicket Pros
- Completely free self-hosted version
- Active open-source community
- Highly customizable
- Supports multiple departments
✗ osTicket Cons
- Dated user interface
- Requires server management
- Limited automation compared to paid tools
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. osTicket targets small businesses and budget conscious teams and leads with ticket-management and email-piping.
On pricing, osTicket is the clear winner for budget-conscious users — starting at $12/mo compared to $29/mo for Grafana. That $17/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.
Grafana edges out on user ratings (4.6 vs 4). While both are well-regarded, that gap reflects real differences in user satisfaction worth considering.
Feature-wise, Grafana offers broader built-in capabilities (8 features vs 6), while osTicket takes a more focused approach — which can mean a simpler, faster onboarding experience.
Bottom line: Grafana has a slight overall edge — but if completely free self-hosted version matters most to you, osTicket may still be the right call.