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Actional vs Grafana comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Actional
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
73rd
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
SOA Governance (5th)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Actional is 0.5%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 3.1%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana3.1%
Actional0.5%
Other96.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

it_user690762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud Effortless scaling Never throws away data Takes action now Delivers analytics at the speed of business Automates and speeds up system discovery I would like to see better marketing. We have used this for four years. There are no deployment issues at this…
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Unified dashboards have empowered teams and have democratized real-time operational insights
Grafana's snapshot and dashboard sharing features are critical for our remote incident response. During production issues, I generate a public snapshot of a dashboard at a specific point and share the URL in our Slack war room so every engineer can see exactly what the metrics looked like when the error occurred. This helps significantly during the process of finding the root cause in those scenarios. The best features Grafana offers go beyond just pretty charts; it is an integration engine. The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere. My team uses this feature by comparing two different tables from the databases to show one single view, which Grafana is really helping with. In a visualized way, the charts can be displayed on one dashboard, allowing end users who are not familiar with these technical aspects to extract valuable data from it. Grafana has positively impacted our organization by democratizing data within our company. Before using Grafana, only developers could see the system health, but now our product managers and executives have their own high-level dashboards, which has improved cross-departmental transparency and alignment.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"From a testing standpoint, ignoring license and cost issues, it's not a bad product."
"This tool has great scaling capabilities, i.e., no limitations."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"We chose this solution because it met the requirements of visualizing and monitoring to make decisions."
"The solution has good features."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"The main benefits I have seen from using Grafana in my day-to-day activities is the visualization of the metrics, specifically Dora Metrics."
"I find Grafana beneficial due to its numerous plugins."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
 

Cons

"My concern is with Automation integration."
"The product could be improved with a feature that provides detailed error messages when we encounter issues."
"​The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards.​"
"It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
"The solution has some stability issues because I don't always see proper results."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution is expensive."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"I am using an open-source version"
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
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885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise25
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
I purchased my Grafana Cloud subscription through the AWS Marketplace, which simplified my procurement process and allowed me to apply the cost towards my AWS committed spend.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
I find that the alerting UI in Grafana can be complex for new users. While it is very powerful, it takes time to learn the differences between contact points, notification policies, and silences. T...
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
My main use case for Grafana involves operational dashboarding and data visualization, where I use it as a central pane of glass to pull in metrics from multiple sources like Prometheus, Elasticsea...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Proximus, Air France-KLM, Barratt Developments, Freedom Mortgage
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Actional vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.