BUT CAN'T GRAFANA DO THAT?
Alfredo vs Grafana
“Can't I just point Grafana at everything?”
Grafana can be built into most of what Alfredo ships assembled; Alfredo also deploys and wires projects, which Grafana never does.
YOU KEEP
Your Grafana, if you run one. Alfredo does not replace deep custom dashboards.
Alfredo and Grafana, across the seven things
The honest version, side by side. Green is automatic, amber is manual work you own, a grey ring is not possible.
| CAPABILITY | Alfredo | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on your servers | Any VPS you can SSH into. Alfredo runs on your servers; it does not host your projects. | Yes — Grafana OSS is free, AGPLv3. |
| Deploys your projects | Built in. Pick the integrations a project needs and deploy — there is no separate PaaS underneath. | No — it observes; it never deploys or provisions. |
| Wires each project at birth | The core claim. Auth, email, database, analytics and payments are configured at creation, secrets are moved for you, and integrations already running are reused. | No — does not apply; every source is wiring you do. |
| One dashboard across projects | One HQ across every project you deploy. | Yes, if you build it — cross-project unification is achievable and is itself an infrastructure project. |
| Sees your business, not just CPU | Payments and email delivery sit next to traffic, errors and uptime — business signals, not just CPU. | DIY — a Sentry data source exists; Stripe is still an open plugin request (grafana/grafana#109069, “Requested”, 2026-07-18); nothing official for Postmark or email delivery. |
| Works without assembly | Zero setup — the cross-project view is assembled for you, not built. | No — it is a dashboard construction kit: exporters, credentials, dashboard JSON, maintained per project. |
| Flat cost for many projects | Flat: you pay for your own box, not per host, per project or per module. | OSS free. Grafana Cloud free tier: 10k series, 50 GB logs, 3 active users, 14-day retention; Pro $19/mo base plus usage (2026-07-18). |
ALFREDO ADDS
The assembled cross-project view without the assembly, plus the deploy and wiring side Grafana never touches. Alfredo is a prototype; Grafana is two decades of dashboard depth.
GRAFANA'S REAL WINS
Depth, flexibility, the data-source ecosystem, and a genuinely free self-hosted tier.
STAY ON GRAFANA IF
Stay put if you already run a happy Grafana/Prometheus stack. You have paid the assembly cost, and Alfredo's pitch is weakest there. Alfredo is an early, unproven prototype; Grafana is the mature, proven thing.