No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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
6.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Scout APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
82nd
Average Rating
10.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Scout APM is 0.4%, up from 0.2% 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 APM0.4%
Other97.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Vitthal Gole - PeerSpot reviewer
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
Proactive monitoring has transformed how our teams detect issues and resolve incidents faster
For improving Grafana, the alert configuration could be more intuitive for new users. Dashboard management becomes complex in large environments. So if we have multiple environments and we have to manage our dashboards for them, sometimes it becomes complicated to manage all the dashboards. The learning curve is steep for beginners. More built-in reporting and analytics features would be helpful. Documentation for advanced features could be more detailed. Role-based access management could be simpler to configure. Performance could be optimized for very large dashboards with high cardinality data sources. Grafana could improve its alert configuration workflow and make advanced dashboard management easier for new users. More built-in reporting features would also be beneficial. A simpler onboarding experience for first-time users and more built-in dashboard templates for common monitoring scenarios would be helpful. Grafana is a powerful monitoring platform, but it could improve dashboard organization in large environments, simplify alert management, provide more built-in reporting capabilities, enhance plugin compatibility during upgrades, and offer better AI-driven insights for fast root cause analysis. For example, if we are hitting a CPU metric of ninety to ninety-five percent or a system load of seventy to eighty percent, we have to act on that. But if Grafana suggests something on that metric, such as an AI suggestion, it would be more helpful. We could get an idea of how to solve that issue. For the Grafana dashboards, they could provide more built-in compliance and audit reporting, enhance AI recommendations with clearer explanations of why an issue was flagged, enhance accessibility and keyboard navigation, add more native integrations with emerging cloud and DevOps tools, and improve scalability for very large enterprise deployments. Grafana is a mature platform, but it could benefit from better dashboard version control, simpler environment migration, enhanced AI explanations, more built-in reporting, and improved performance for large-scale deployments with complex dashboards.
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

"It's easy to make changes. We can put many dashboards in one place. There's no delay in showing data - what you see on Grafana matches the server metrics."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"Grafana's best features are live monitoring and alerts."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"The solution's application server is easy to use and its overall architecture is better for development."
"Grafana integrates with some of the tools we've chosen beforehand, and while I'm not the right person to elaborate on this since I'm more focused on managing big teams, the teams working with it seem happy."
"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."
"The solution is adaptable, easy to use, and works well for microservices development."
"Everything that is around the digital performance environment, I can see."
"The product can scale."
 

Cons

"The formatting could be better."
"The features are complicated and not intuitive."
"Grafana could be improved through enhancement of graphs and visualizations and providing more integrations."
"The solution has some stability issues because I don't always see proper results."
"The product's configuration for saving files could be improved."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"I don't believe that Grafana fulfilled the requirements completely. That's why we moved to Datadog."
"I can't recall coming across any missing features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"I am using an open-source version"
"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."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"We are using the open-source license."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
We are using the community edition. We have used the community edition, the open-source edition. So, there were no licensing costs. The setup was straightforward, and the main investment was the ti...
What needs improvement with Grafana?
For improving Grafana, the alert configuration could be more intuitive for new users. Dashboard management becomes complex in large environments. So if we have multiple environments and we have to ...
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
The main use case for Grafana is that we are using Prometheus to collect the metrics, and primarily use Grafana for infrastructure and application monitoring. It helps me visualize system metrics t...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.