Beszel vs Grafana: which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to Datadog. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| Beszel | Grafana | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Monitoring, Logs & Errors | Dev Tools |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| GitHub stars | ~25k | ~66k |
| Tech stack | Go, SQLite | Go, React |
| Replaces | Datadog, New Relic | Datadog |
Grafana has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
Beszel
Ultra-lightweight server monitor, a single binary, a minimal alternative to Datadog.
Pros
- A single binary with no dependencies, with lightweight agents per monitored server
Things to consider
- No application error tracking, infrastructure only
Grafana
Observability dashboards, a self-hosted alternative to Datadog.
Pros
- Dashboards connected to dozens of different data sources, with multichannel alerting
Things to consider
- You need Prometheus/Loki/Tempo separately for data collection
Key features
Beszel
- Single binary/container, no dependencies
- Lightweight agents per monitored server
- CPU/RAM/disk/network usage history
Grafana
- Dashboards connected to dozens of data sources
- Multichannel alerting
- Logs and traces explorer
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