Grafana vs Highlight.io for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Grafana Overview

Grafana is the industry standard for data visualization and dashboarding. It does not collect data itself. Instead, it connects to data sources like Prometheus (metrics), Loki (logs), Jaeger (traces), and dozens of others, then lets you build beautiful, customizable dashboards to visualize that data. If you have ever seen those impressive server monitoring dashboards with real-time graphs, there is a good chance they were built with Grafana.

For solo developers, Grafana is powerful but demanding. You need to set up the data collection layer yourself. That means running Prometheus to scrape metrics, Loki to aggregate logs, and configuring exporters for your specific services. The payoff is complete control. You can monitor anything: server CPU, memory, disk usage, application-specific metrics, database performance, even business KPIs.

I run Grafana on my own K3s cluster, and the dashboards are genuinely useful once configured. But I will not sugarcoat it: the initial setup took hours, not minutes. Grafana Cloud offers a free tier that removes some of that burden, giving you hosted Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo with 10,000 metrics series, 50 GB of logs, and 50 GB of traces per month. That is enough for most solo projects.

Highlight.io Overview

Highlight.io is an open-source, full-stack monitoring platform that bundles error tracking, session replay, log management, and traces into one product. Think of it as Sentry plus LogRocket plus a log viewer, all in one place. You install the SDK, and it starts capturing frontend errors, backend errors, user sessions, and application logs automatically.

The setup experience is dramatically simpler than Grafana. Install the npm package, add a few lines of initialization code, and you are collecting data within minutes. The session replay shows you exactly what users experienced when an error occurred. The error tracking groups exceptions and links them to the replay. The log viewer searches your backend logs with filtering and correlation.

For solo developers, Highlight.io is appealing because it reduces the number of tools you need. Instead of stitching together Sentry for errors, LogRocket for sessions, and Grafana for logs, you get one dashboard that ties everything together. The free tier includes 500 sessions and 1 million log lines per month, which covers early-stage projects well. Being open source also means you can self-host if you prefer.

When to Pick Grafana

Grafana is the right choice when you need deep infrastructure monitoring with full customization, and you are willing to invest time in setup.

Pick Grafana if:

• You manage your own servers or Kubernetes clusters
• You need highly customizable dashboards
• You already use Prometheus, Loki, or other CNCF tools
• You want to monitor infrastructure-level metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network)
• You need long-term metric retention and alerting
• You enjoy building and tweaking dashboards

Grafana is also the better choice if your monitoring needs extend beyond web applications. If you are running databases, message queues, background workers, or any complex infrastructure, Grafana's ecosystem has exporters for virtually everything.

When to Pick Highlight.io

Highlight.io is the right choice when you want comprehensive application monitoring without spending days on setup.

Pick Highlight.io if:

• You are building a web application and want errors, sessions, and logs in one place
• You value fast setup over deep customization
• You want session replay to debug user-reported issues
• You prefer a single tool over stitching together multiple services
• You are an early-stage project that needs monitoring now, not next week
• You like open source and want the option to self-host later

The Verdict

This comes down to what you are monitoring and how much setup time you are willing to spend. Grafana gives you the most powerful, flexible monitoring stack available, but you pay for it with complexity. Highlight.io gives you practical, full-stack application monitoring that works out of the box.

For a solo developer shipping a web application, I would start with Highlight.io. You get error tracking, session replay, and logging in one tool, set up in under 10 minutes. Save Grafana for when you are managing infrastructure, such as when you move from managed hosting to your own servers or Kubernetes cluster. At that point, Grafana becomes essential.

If you are already running your own infrastructure and comfortable with the Prometheus ecosystem, Grafana is hard to beat. But if you just want to know what is breaking in your app and why, Highlight.io gets you there faster.