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Grafana Alloy vs Metricbeat: catalog facts
Grafana Alloy	Metricbeat
Free Free and open source from Grafana Labs.	Free Free to download; Elastic Cloud hosting is a paid option.
Self-hosted	Windows, Linux, Command line
One collector for logs and other telemetry Replacement for the retired Promtail	Ready-made modules for common services like Apache, Redis and NGINX Packages for apt, yum, Docker and Kubernetes
Only a collector; needs Loki, Grafana or another backend to be useful Configuration takes time to learn	Most useful alongside Elasticsearch and Kibana Default build is under the source-available Elastic License
Self-hosted	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License not stated	License: Apache-2.0 (OSS build); Elastic License (default build)
No account needed	No account needed
Not stated if it works offline	Not stated if it works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 23, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 1, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.