Grafana
Plane
| Feature | Grafana | Plane |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $7/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.2 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | developers, open-source-advocates, startups, engineering-teams |
| Founded | 2014 | 2022 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Cycles | ✗ | ✓ |
| Modules | ✗ | ✓ |
| Views | ✗ | ✓ |
| Pages | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self Hostable | ✗ | ✓ |
| Analytics | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ 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
✓ Plane Pros
- Open source and self-hostable
- Modern clean interface
- Jira-like power without complexity
- Active community
✗ Plane Cons
- Relatively new
- Smaller integration ecosystem
- Documentation still maturing
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. Plane targets developers and open source advocates and leads with cycles and modules.
On pricing, Plane is the clear winner for budget-conscious users — starting at $7/mo compared to $29/mo for Grafana. That $22/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 4.2). 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 Plane takes a more focused approach — which can mean a simpler, faster onboarding experience.
Bottom line: Grafana has a slight overall edge — but if open source and self-hostable matters most to you, Plane may still be the right call.