Grafana vs Redash

Grafana has a free tier and a Pro plan with a $19 monthly platform fee plus usage. Free includes 10,000 active metric series per month and 50 GB per month for logs, traces and profiles, with 14-day retention. Pro lists 13 months of metrics retention and 30 days for logs, traces and profiles; usage above included amounts costs extra. Enterprise requires a $25,000 annual spend commit.

Redash’s self-hosted open-source edition costs $0, with unlimited users, queries and dashboards, subject to your host’s capacity. Its listed hosted plans start at $49 per month for three data sources, but Hosted Redash has been sunset. The $49, $99 and $450 monthly prices are legacy plan figures, not current hosted options. Annual prices are not published for either product.

These tools solve different problems. Grafana is an observability platform for telemetry: it brings logs, metrics, traces and other signals together, with dashboards for exploring that data. Its listed features also include an AI assistant, root cause analysis, agent observability, incident response tools and Adaptive Telemetry for deciding what data to keep or aggregate. That breadth fits teams responsible for production systems, but it is more than a SQL dashboard tool.

Redash centers on querying data and sharing results. Its browser-based SQL editor, schema browsing and reusable snippets support query writing; teams can then build dashboard visualizations, schedule refreshes, set alerts and share dashboards with a team or the public. The open-source edition has no user, query or dashboard caps, though host infrastructure still limits usage. If your requirement is telemetry observability, Grafana is the closer fit. For SQL-driven dashboards, Redash has the more focused feature set; its review notes that BI features are limited.

Redash’s workflow is built around writing SQL, browsing schemas and turning query results into dashboards. That’s a direct fit for teams comfortable querying their own data; it is less suitable if nobody on the team wants to work in SQL. Self-hosting also means your team must manage the host, since the free edition’s capacity depends on that infrastructure.

Grafana’s scope is broader: users work with telemetry signals, dashboards and observability features such as investigations and root cause analysis. That can make it a better match for operations teams, but it also means choosing and managing usage across more products. The product descriptions do not provide a comparable setup-time or learning-curve measure, so we’d base the choice on whether the team needs SQL dashboards or observability tooling.