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Grafana vs Portkey comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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

Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Portkey
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
36th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Portkey is 0.3%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana2.6%
Portkey0.3%
Other97.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Shravan Revanna - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Engineer at a non-profit with 51-200 employees
Centralized AI control has standardized our workflows and delivers faster, more reliable features
There are definitely some places where Portkey can be improved. Overall, the experience has been positive, but the first area is analytics and reporting. While the observability feature is excellent, we would like to have richer historical analytics and customizable dashboards. For example, it would be useful to see trends by applications and teams or features over long periods without exporting data to an external BI tool. Another area is governance for large organizations. As AI adoption grows, enterprises need more granular, role-based access control. We would like to see more advanced AI evaluation capability built into the platform itself, including features such as prompt versioning and automated quality scoring and regression testing. Finally, while the platform is supported with multiple providers, we would welcome even more intelligent routing capabilities, such as automatically selecting the best model based on latency, cost, and task complexity using configurable policies. These are not major pain points, but they are enhancements that would make an already strong platform even more valuable for an organization that scales their AI workloads. Documentation and onboarding could be enhanced. Portkey is developer-friendly, but we need more end-to-end references, architecture, and implementation guides for common AI patterns. This would help teams adopt it even faster. I did not give Portkey a perfect score because while it has become a foundational component in our AI stack and solves several operational challenges, I would still like to see deeper analytics, stronger enterprise governance features, and more built-in AI evaluation capabilities, especially for prompt testing, regression analysis, and model benchmarking. I would be comfortable recommending Portkey to any organization that is building multiple AI applications or wants to manage a scalable way to handle LLM providers and produce AI traffic.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The main benefits I have seen from using Grafana in my day-to-day activities is the visualization of the metrics, specifically Dora Metrics."
"The dashboards are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization."
"It has good stability."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature."
"Portkey has significantly improved the organization by streamlining the AI processes being followed."
"Portkey is totally stable; it is one of the best software solutions in the market for this purpose."
"Portkey definitely provides a solid alternative solution for the agent and large model hosting platforms, and it is very helpful for us to explore the possibilities across the industry rather than staying with a few mainstream options."
"Overall, Portkey has had a huge business impact in terms of cost savings and operational efficiency."
 

Cons

"Regarding joining between queries, merging between two queries that give the same information could be simple, and there are some ways to do that, but if there was something even easier, it would be great."
"Perhaps the display of the trigger limits should be more efficient because it's difficult to see that in a graph."
"Its interface could be more accessible."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"There are definitely some places where Portkey can be improved."
"One major problem I see with Portkey is that when I had not yet started any trial, it started to denote that I had exceeded the prompt limit."
"However, one thing I would like to say is that it could have better documentation."
"The main area for improvement is onboarding and trial experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very reasonable and has excellent community support.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Currently, I do not think that any improvement is required, but there are multiple use cases.
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
My main use case for Grafana is to create and design dashboards based on the metrics provided by different exporters via Prometheus. We have different exporters, and we are creating different dashb...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portkey?
Portkey is requiring production to be $49, I guess that is US dollars per month for 100K logs. I would say it is manageable.
What needs improvement with Portkey?
One major problem I see with Portkey is that when I had not yet started any trial, it started to denote that I had exceeded the prompt limit. Users are usually expecting a trial stage with more tok...
What is your primary use case for Portkey?
Our team is searching for an alternative to LiteLLM, which is another monitoring management platform, and we found that Portkey is an alternative solution that we decided to try out. We want to con...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Portkey and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.