Grafana is everywhere, and deservedly so: it will visualize almost any data source, the plugin ecosystem is enormous, and the open-source edition has become the default way teams look at their metrics. What it isn't is finished. You bring the storage, you build the dashboards, you write the alert rules, and you maintain all of it. Plexus is the other model: connect a device or the datastore you already run, and the starter dashboard generates itself from the first data that lands. Monitors — threshold, event, offline — ship built in, with per-monitor routing to email, Slack, or webhooks, and every alert keeps a timeline you can audit.
Grafana is a open-source dashboards & visualization. Grafana visualizes whatever you wire up and tune; Plexus auto-builds the fleet view from the data itself — and because both can read an existing store, plenty of teams keep Grafana for bespoke views alongside. This page is written by Plexus, so read it with that in mind — we’ve tried to be straight about where Grafana is the better choice. Last updated July 2026.
Keep Grafana for the dashboards you've lovingly built — if your metrics land in a store Plexus connects to (Postgres, TimescaleDB, MySQL, ClickHouse), the two can read the same data and you lose nothing. What changes is the starting point: with Plexus the fleet view isn't a project you build, it's the default you get on first ingest, with monitors and an alert history already attached.
● full · ◐ partial · ○ not today
| Capability | Plexus | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
Bespoke dashboard-building across many data sources Grafana is the gold standard for building any dashboard across any source. Plexus dashboards are editable, but it isn't a general-purpose dashboard builder. | ◐ | ● |
Plugin and data-source ecosystem Grafana's plugin catalog is vast and mature; Plexus connects to far fewer sources today. | ○ | ● |
Self-host the whole thing, for free Both, and neither makes you talk to a salesperson first. Grafana OSS is AGPLv3. The Plexus platform is source-available under the Elastic License 2.0 — free for a single team, no usage caps, no phone-home — and installs with one command. | ● | ● |
Open-source ubiquity and ecosystem Not close, and worth being precise about: Grafana is OSI open source with roughly 35 million users and a vast plugin catalog. Plexus is source-available rather than OSI open source (our SDKs are Apache-2.0), far younger, and connects to far fewer sources. If OSI licensing or ecosystem breadth is your requirement, Grafana wins outright. | ○ | ● |
Works out of the box (storage + dashboards + alerting, no assembly) Grafana is pieces you wire together and tune; Plexus works on connect. | ● | ○ |
Dashboards auto-generated from first ingest Grafana dashboards are hand-built or imported from templates. Plexus generates the starter dashboard from the metrics that actually land. | ● | ○ |
Built-in storage and retention (3-year raw, 5-year rollups) Grafana visualizes other stores; Plexus includes one — 3-year raw retention, 5-year hourly rollups — and can also read yours. | ● | ○ |
Offline detection and per-monitor notification routing Grafana alerting can be configured to do much of this. Plexus ships it as first-class monitors — threshold, event, offline — each with its own email, Slack, or webhook routing. | ● | ◐ |
Per-alert audit trail with verdict capture Grafana keeps alert state history. Plexus keeps a full per-alert timeline plus the human verdict on whether it was real. | ● | ◐ |
Reads a datastore you already run Both read external stores — Grafana as data sources, Plexus as connections to Postgres, TimescaleDB, MySQL, or ClickHouse. | ● | ● |
Pick Grafana Pick Grafana if you want to build and own bespoke dashboards across many data sources, you value the enormous plugin ecosystem, and you have the team to assemble the storage and alerting around it. For custom visualization, nothing is more flexible.
Pick Plexus Pick Plexus if you want the fleet view without the project: dashboards that generate themselves on first ingest, monitors with routing and offline detection built in, and an audit trail on every alert — rather than wiring a store, Grafana, and alert rules together and maintaining them. You can keep Grafana for bespoke views either way.
If you're monitoring one known device, this works well: alert on absent(your_metric), or use Grafana's No Data state, and you'll be told when it stops reporting. Where it gets hard is a fleet whose membership changes. When one series among many stops arriving, Grafana has nothing left to evaluate for that device, so the alert tends to resolve rather than fire — the series simply isn't there any more. The usual workaround is to keep a separate list of the devices you expect to be reporting and join your live query against it, so a missing device shows up as a mismatch rather than as silence. That's genuinely fiddly to maintain in alert rules, and it's the reason Plexus treats the fleet as a declared thing rather than inferring it from whatever data happens to arrive — an expected device that stops reporting is a first-class offline monitor. If you're staying on Grafana, the expected-list join is the pattern to reach for.
For a hardware fleet's day-to-day operations view, yes — Plexus ships storage, auto-generated dashboards, monitors, and alert history as one platform, where Grafana is a stack you assemble. For highly custom dashboards across many data sources, Grafana's builder is still broader, and some teams keep it for exactly that.
Yes. If your metrics land in Postgres, TimescaleDB, MySQL, or ClickHouse, both tools can read the same store — Grafana as a data source, Plexus as a connection. You keep every dashboard you've built and add auto-generated fleet views, monitors, and alert history on top.
Plexus includes storage — 3-year raw retention (7 days hot, then S3) and 5-year hourly rollups — so you don't have to stand anything up. If you already have a store Plexus supports, it connects to it in place instead.
It starts finished. Dashboards generate themselves from the first data a source sends; threshold, event, and offline monitors ship built in with per-monitor email, Slack, or webhook routing; every alert keeps a timeline with verdict capture; and the ⌘K terminal lets you query the fleet in plain language. With Grafana, each of those is something you build and maintain.