Compare / SigNoz vs Grafana
SigNoz vs Grafana
Pick SigNoz if you want the published New Relic / Honeycomb / Dynatrace stack (MIT-community OpenTelemetry; skip ee/ and cmd/enterprise/). Pick Grafana OSS if you want dashboards rather than a unified APM.
Facts checked 27 Oct 2026. License, language, and GitHub activity come from the catalog or the project's own repo. "Not in the catalog row" means the public catalog dump does not store that number.
SigNoz in the catalog Grafana in the catalog Start on Railway
How they compare
| SigNoz | Grafana | |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT License for community code (catalog); skip ee/ and cmd/enterprise/ source | Grafana OSS is AGPL; the catalog row is the hosted product page source |
| Language | TypeScript (catalog) | Not in the catalog row |
| GitHub activity | 32,448 stars in the catalog source | Not in the catalog row |
| Self-host | Published as /stacks/signoz-observability. ClickHouse plus the query service. | Published as /stacks/grafana-observability. Pair with Prometheus. Do not enable Grafana Cloud. |
| Best for | The published New Relic / Honeycomb / Dynatrace replacement. | Dashboards if the job is not a unified APM. |
Self-hosting and resource needs
SigNoz is the published lander — /stacks/signoz-observability. SigNoz is SigNoz/signoz (MIT community; 32,448 stars in the catalog). Grafana's catalog row is the hosted product page; this pair is Grafana OSS you run — /stacks/grafana-observability (not Grafana Cloud). Prometheus is the metrics TSDB, not this pair. Neither has a one-click c17 Railway template.
FAQ
- Honeycomb or Dynatrace?
- Same published APM — /replace/honeycomb and /replace/dynatrace.
- Where is Loki?
- Log aggregation — /compare/signoz-vs-loki. Not this pair.
- Are these free?
- SigNoz community is MIT if you skip ee/. Grafana OSS is AGPL. You pay hosting.
- How do I deploy SigNoz?
- Open /stacks/signoz-observability. Persist ClickHouse. Confirm one trace.
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