Grafana
Portainer
| Feature | Grafana | Portainer |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $12/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.4 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | devops-engineers, system-admins, small-teams, docker-users |
| Founded | 2014 | 2017 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Container Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Stack Deployment | ✗ | ✓ |
| User Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Registry Access | ✗ | ✓ |
| Monitoring | ✗ | ✓ |
| Edge Computing | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ 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
✓ Portainer Pros
- Visual UI for Docker/K8s management
- Free for up to 5 environments
- Simplifies container deployment
- Role-based access control
✗ Portainer Cons
- Enterprise features are paid
- Can lag behind Docker CLI capabilities
- Limited CI/CD features
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. Portainer targets devops engineers and system admins and leads with container-management and stack-deployment.
On pricing, Portainer 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.
Feature-wise, Grafana offers broader built-in capabilities (8 features vs 6), while Portainer 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.