GraphJSON vs Grafana

Grafana is the standard open-source dashboarding tool for infrastructure observability: connect it to Prometheus, InfluxDB, Loki, or dozens of other data sources and you can build any dashboard you want. GraphJSON is a fully managed event store and analytics layer: you send JSON events with a single HTTP request and get analyzed dashboards, SQL notebooks, alerts, and embeds on top, with nothing to run yourself.

They overlap in one place — dashboards over time-series data — but they start from opposite ends of the problem. Grafana assumes you already have your data in a database and gives you visualization. GraphJSON starts at the data: collection, storage, and analysis in one product.

1. Built for different data#

Grafana shines on infrastructure metrics and logs — CPU, request rates, error counts — pulled from existing systems like Prometheus or Elasticsearch. It doesn't collect anything itself; it's a window onto databases you operate.

GraphJSON is built for product and business events — signups, purchases, feature usage, API payloads. Any JSON you can construct can be logged and analyzed: funnels, retention, per-user behavior, revenue over time. The analysis surface (top keys, distributions, SQL over your event payloads) assumes semi-structured events, not scraped metrics.

2. Nothing to manage#

Self-hosting Grafana means provisioning a server, managing upgrades, configuring data sources, and operating the underlying databases those sources point to. Grafana Cloud removes some of that, but you still own the data pipeline: agents, exporters, schemas, and a metrics backend.

With GraphJSON there is no server, no agent, no exporter, and no schema. You get an API key and start logging events in minutes. Storage, indexing, and query performance are handled for you — the same way you'd expect from any modern SaaS.

3. Log anything with a single POST#

Grafana has no ingestion API of its own. GraphJSON's entire logging API is one request — no SDK or library required:

curl -X POST https://api.graphjson.com/api/log \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"api_key": "<your-api-key>", "collection": "billing_events", "json": "{\"event\": \"purchase_completed\", \"plan\": \"pro\", \"mrr\": 49}"}'

Nested objects and arrays are flattened automatically, and every field becomes queryable and chartable immediately. There are also no-code integrations for Vercel log drains and Stripe events.

4. Dashboards, SQL notebooks, and embeds included#

Grafana dashboards are assembled panel by panel over query languages that depend on your datasource. GraphJSON generates analyzed dashboards for your events automatically, and when you want full control you can query your events with raw ClickHouse SQL and chart the results in a notebook. Finished dashboards can be embedded into your own app with a single iframe — including dynamic per-request filters, so each of your customers sees only their own data.

5. Pricing and operations#

Grafana OSS is free to download but you pay in servers, storage, and the engineer time to run the metrics stack. GraphJSON is free up to 5,000 stored events and uses published usage-based pricing after that—see pricing. No analytics infrastructure is required on your side, and support comes directly from the people building the product.

Where Grafana shines#

To be fair: for infrastructure monitoring, Grafana is the right tool and the ecosystem is enormous. Its datasource plugins cover virtually every metrics and logging system, the OSS community is huge, alerting is mature, and for homogenous high-cardinality metrics, Prometheus + Grafana is a battle-tested combination. Many teams reasonably run Grafana for infra and a product analytics tool for business events side by side.

But if your goal is to understand what users are doing in your product — not what your servers are doing — you shouldn't need to stand up a database and a dashboard server to get there.