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Grafana vs Skyline
Short answer: Pick Grafana if you want open-standard full-stack observability; pick Skyline if you want alerting and visibility for Laravel queues. Grafana has a free plan; Skyline is paid.
GrafanaOpen-source dashboards and observability
SkylineSkyline adds the missing alerting layer to Laravel HorizonWhich to pick
Pick Grafana if you want…
- Open-standard full-stack observability
- General observability dashboards
- A free plan to start with
- Open-source code (grafana/grafana on GitHub, AGPL-3.0 license)
- Integrations with OpenTelemetry or Kubernetes (on Grafana's list, not Skyline's)
Pick Skyline if you want…
- Alerting and visibility for Laravel queues
- Integrations with Laravel Horizon, Redis or PagerDuty (on Skyline's list, not Grafana's)
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.
- Skyline:Skyline is a drop-in replacement for Laravel Horizon that adds alerts, lock management, metrics and job logging.
- Best for
- Grafana:Open-standard full-stack observability
- Skyline:Alerting and visibility for Laravel queues
- Who it’s for
- Grafana:Developers, SREs and teams needing full-stack observability and cost-optimized telemetry.
- Skyline:Laravel developers who use Horizon for queue management.
- Pricing
- Grafana:Freemium
- Skyline:Paid
- Free plan or trial
- Grafana:Free plan (Free)
- Skyline:—
- Plans
- Grafana:Free $0 · Pro $19 per month + usage · Enterprise $25,000 per year spend commit
- Skyline:—
- Open source
- Grafana:Yes, 77,033 GitHub stars
- Skyline:—
- Works with
- Grafana:OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Slack
- Skyline:Laravel Horizon, Redis, Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Prometheus, Grafana
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.
Skyline features
- Drop-in Horizon replacement. Installs via Composer, keeps the same config, namespace and dashboard URL.
- Queue alerts. Notifies via Slack, email, SMS, PagerDuty or Opsgenie when queues stall, workers crash or Horizon stops.
- Unique lock management. Shows held ShouldBeUnique locks, their age and provides a Release button.
- Memory & CPU metrics. Shows per-job-class memory and CPU usage and worker restart reasons.
- Job lifecycle logging. Writes a log line for every job transition (queued, reserved, released, failed, etc.).
- Job search. Search jobs by class name or dispatched arguments across pending, completed and failed jobs.
- Prometheus & Grafana support. Exports metrics via a Prometheus endpoint and includes a Grafana dashboard.
- Queue controls. Pause/resume individual queues, run delayed jobs now, delete jobs or empty queues from the UI.
Grafana vs Skyline FAQ
What is the difference between Grafana and Skyline?+
Grafana provides dashboards but no queue-specific alerts or lock management for Laravel Horizon.
Should I use Grafana or Skyline?+
Pick Grafana if you want open-standard full-stack observability, general observability dashboards or a free plan to start with. Pick Skyline if you want alerting and visibility for Laravel queues or integrations with Laravel Horizon, Redis or PagerDuty (on Skyline's list, not Grafana's).
Is Grafana or Skyline free?+
Grafana has a free plan and paid plans. Skyline is paid.
Is Grafana or Skyline open source?+
Grafana is open source (grafana/grafana on GitHub, AGPL-3.0 license). DevHunt has no public source repository on record for Skyline.
Do Grafana and Skyline integrate with the same tools?+
Partly. Both list Prometheus and Slack. Grafana also lists OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes; Skyline also lists Laravel Horizon, Redis, PagerDuty, Opsgenie and 1 more.
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.