Alertmanager vs Karma
Prometheus alert UI — built-in router vs. multi-cluster dashboard
| Alertmanager | Karma | |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | The deduplication, grouping, and routing layer for Prometheus alerts. Sends to PagerDuty, Slack, email, webhooks. | Drop-in dashboard for Alertmanager — multi-cluster aggregation, richer grouping UI, on-call status, silence management. |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | TypeScript / Go |
| GitHub stars (approx) | 8500 | 2500 |
| Categories | alerts | alerts |
| Replaces SaaS | ||
| Self-host deployment | single binary, docker, kubernetes helm | single binary, docker, kubernetes helm |
| Commercial hosted option | no / self-host only | no / self-host only |
| Repository | https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager | https://github.com/prymitive/karma |
| Freshness checked | 2026-05-17 | 2026-05-17 |
When to prefer Alertmanager
You need the actual alert routing, grouping, silencing, and notification dispatch engine. Alertmanager is the canonical Prometheus alert router — it receives alerts and delivers them to PagerDuty, Slack, or email.
When to prefer Karma
You already run Alertmanager (one or many instances) and you need a better dashboard for triage across clusters. Karma is a read-only UI that aggregates multiple Alertmanager instances into a single grouped, filterable view — it does not replace Alertmanager, it sits on top of it.