Perses vs Grafana
dashboarding - GitOps-friendly CNCF resources vs. mature plugin-rich visualization default
| Perses | Grafana | |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | CNCF dashboarding tool with dashboards-as-code, static validation, and Kubernetes-native workflows. A GitOps-friendly Grafana alternative. | The de-facto open-source dashboard layer. Plug into Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB — one pane of glass. |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go / TypeScript | Go / TypeScript |
| GitHub stars (approx) | 2200 | 65000 |
| Categories | metrics, logs, traces, profiling | metrics, logs, traces |
| Replaces SaaS | grafana, datadog | datadog, new-relic, dynatrace |
| Self-host deployment | docker, kubernetes helm, operator | docker, kubernetes helm, apt, rpm, homebrew |
| Commercial hosted option | no / self-host only | yes (vendor-run) |
| Repository | https://github.com/perses/perses | https://github.com/grafana/grafana |
| Freshness checked | 2026-06-23 | 2026-04-22 |
When to prefer Perses
You want Apache-2.0 dashboarding that treats dashboards and datasources as validated resources in Git, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. Perses is attractive for platform teams standardizing Prometheus-family dashboards as code.
When to prefer Grafana
You need the deepest datasource ecosystem, alerting features, community dashboards, and panel/plugin compatibility today. Grafana remains the safer default when the priority is broad support rather than a cleaner dashboard-as-code model.