Grafana vs SigNoz: 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.
| Grafana | SigNoz | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Dev Tools | Monitoring, Logs & Errors |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| GitHub stars | ~66k | ~32k |
| Tech stack | Go, React | Go, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry |
| Replaces | Datadog | Datadog, New Relic |
Grafana has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
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
SigNoz
Unified metrics + traces + logs, an alternative to Datadog/New Relic.
Pros
- The OpenTelemetry standard avoids locking you into a proprietary SDK
Things to consider
- ClickHouse adds operational complexity
Key features
Grafana
- Dashboards connected to dozens of data sources
- Multichannel alerting
- Logs and traces explorer
SigNoz
- 100% built on OpenTelemetry (open standard)
- Metrics, traces and logs in one dashboard
- Configurable alerts
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