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Grafana vs Mtop
Grafana offers dashboards for metrics across services, whereas mtop is local Mac system stats.
GrafanaOpen-source dashboards and observability
MtopA CPU, GPU, Process and memory monitor for your Mac's menu Bar!Which to pick
Pick Grafana if you want…
- Open-standard full-stack observability
- Custom observability dashboards
- A free plan to start with
Pick Mtop if you want…
- Menu-bar system monitoring
Side by side
- What it is
- Grafana:Grafana Cloud is an open-source-based observability platform that unifies metrics, logs, traces, profiles and business data.
- Mtop:mtop is a lightweight Mac menu-bar app that monitors CPU, GPU, memory and processes.
- Best for
- Grafana:Open-standard full-stack observability
- Mtop:Menu-bar system monitoring
- Who it’s for
- Grafana:Developers, SREs and teams needing full-stack observability and cost-optimized telemetry.
- Mtop:Mac developers and power users who want quick system stats in the menu bar.
- Pricing
- Grafana:Freemium
- Mtop:Paid
- Plans
- Grafana:Free $0 · Pro $19 per month + usage · Enterprise $25,000 per year spend commit
- Mtop:—
- Open source
- Grafana:Yes, 77,033 GitHub stars
- Mtop:Yes, 17 GitHub stars
- Works with
- Grafana:OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Slack
- Mtop:—
Grafana features
- AI Assistant. Ask natural-language questions, build dashboards and run investigations directly from Grafana, Slack or the terminal.
- Adaptive Telemetry. Automatically identifies low-value data and aggregates it, cutting telemetry spend by up to 80%.
- Full-stack observability. Unified view of metrics, logs, traces, profiles and synthetic monitoring on a single map.
- OpenTelemetry-native. Native support for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus with hundreds of plugins and integrations.
- Cost Management. Pay-as-you-go pricing with volume-based discounts and a free tier that includes all services.
- Compliance & Security. FedRAMP, NIST-100, PCI-DSS, GDPR and SOC-2 certifications for enterprise use.
Mtop features
- CPU & Core Count. Shows current CPU usage and number of cores directly in the menu bar.
- Memory Usage. Displays total memory consumption with a visual indicator.
- GPU Load Monitor. Shows total GPU usage alongside CPU and memory stats.
- Process Table. Lists running processes with CPU %, memory % and PID.
- Colour Schemes. Offers 9 customizable colour themes for the usage bars.
Grafana vs Mtop FAQ
Is Grafana or Mtop free?+
Grafana has a free plan and paid plans. Mtop is paid.
Is Grafana or Mtop open source?+
Yes, both are open source: Grafana (grafana/grafana on GitHub, AGPL-3.0 license) and Mtop (connor-finlay/mactop on GitHub, GPL-2.0 license).
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.