Grafana
Weights & Biases
| Feature | Grafana | Weights & Biases |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $50/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.7 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | ml-engineers, research-teams, ai-companies, data-scientists |
| Founded | 2014 | 2017 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Experiment Tracking | ✗ | ✓ |
| Model Registry | ✗ | ✓ |
| Sweeps | ✗ | ✓ |
| Artifacts | ✗ | ✓ |
| Reports | ✗ | ✓ |
| Launch | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ 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
✓ Weights & Biases Pros
- Best-in-class experiment tracking
- Beautiful visualizations
- Great collaboration features
- Generous free tier
✗ Weights & Biases Cons
- Learning curve for full platform
- Can be expensive for large teams
- Requires integration work
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. Weights & Biases targets ml engineers and research teams and leads with experiment-tracking and model-registry.
On pricing, Grafana is the clear winner for budget-conscious users — starting at $29/mo compared to $50/mo for Weights & Biases. That $21/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 Weights & Biases 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.