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Grafana vs Scout APM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Scout APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
79th
Average Rating
10.0
Number of Reviews
1
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 Scout APM is 0.5%, up from 0.3% 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%
Scout APM0.5%
Other96.9%
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.
Antonio_Barros - PeerSpot reviewer
Regional Manager LatAm at Splunk
Great visibility and reliability with fair pricing
The solution is stable. It's pretty easy to set up, especially if you have the knowledge base and/or you have a partner assist you. The product can scale. The processes are great. It helps with services and microservices. The product is great for man different industries, including energy, government, finance, and more.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
"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 provides a graphical representation and it's clear to see what's happening."
"Grafana saves us hours compared to DataDog."
"Grafana is great when it comes to capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
"We chose this solution because it met the requirements of visualizing and monitoring to make decisions."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that."
"Everything that is around the digital performance environment, I can see."
"The product can scale."
 

Cons

"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"​The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards.​"
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"Grafana could consider building its own metrics system to eliminate the reliance on other tools like Prometheus, providing a one-stop solution."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"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."
"The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement."
"I can't recall coming across any missing features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am using an open-source version"
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"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."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"We are using the open-source license."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
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%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Construction Company
11%
Retailer
11%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

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...
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Comparisons

 

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.
Chargify, Synctree, Aptuitiv, Barnes and Noble, Journey, Geosnapshot, Kongregate, PaperTrail, Adobe, SendGrid, Sentry
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: June 2026.
903,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.