Glance vs Grafana
| Tagline | Highly customizable dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place | Observability and analytics dashboards for metrics, logs, and time series |
| Category | BI & Dashboards | BI & Dashboards |
| Replaces | Tableau, Looker, Power BI | Tableau, Power BI, Datadog |
| GitHub stars | 35k | 74k |
| Language | Docker | TypeScript |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Manual | One-Click Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 19 days ago | today |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Glance
- No built-in database or persistent data store; purely a read/aggregation layer
- No multi-user support or access control
- No data source connectors for business databases or warehouses (unlike Tableau/Power BI)
- No interactive charts, pivot tables, or drill-down analytics
Grafana
- Oriented toward time-series and observability, not ad-hoc business analytics or pivot-style exploration
- No business-friendly visual query builder; dashboards assume knowledge of data sources and query languages
- Weak at relational/tabular BI reporting compared to Tableau or Power BI
- No semantic modeling layer; data modeling lives in the underlying sources
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Grafana for the larger community and ecosystem. Grafana has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.