Mackerel vs Netdata
Mackerel
mackerel.ioNetdata
netdata.cloudSide by side
| Figure | Mackerel | Netdata |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $4.50/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 4 |
| Spec score · Cloud Monitoring | 7.8 (#11) | 8.9 (#6) |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Monitoring | 7.9 (#15) | 9.0 (#4) |
| Extensibility | Users can extend monitoring with open-source plugins, APIs, and the mkr command-line tool. | The project describes a modular plugin and collector architecture that supports custom metrics and integrations with other monitoring systems. |
| Founded | 2001 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Kyoto, Japan | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Monitoring | Mackerel supports combining metrics, monitoring predicted values, and machine-learning anomaly detection. | Netdata says it supports per-second metrics and ML-based anomaly detection and troubleshooting. |
| Support | Customer Reliability Engineers provide technical support and can guide customers through implementation and use. | The site lists documentation and community support, with premium support available. |
| Trial | The two-week free trial provides Standard-plan functions, with a trial trace-span allowance of 100M spans. | The pricing FAQ states that signing up for Netdata Cloud provides a 14-day Business trial for any number of nodes with no limits. |
Plans
Mackerel
- FreeFree
- StandardPrice not published
- Standard (micro host)Priced on request
Netdata
- CommunityFree
- Business$4.50 a month
- Homelab$90 a year
- Enterprise On-PremisePriced on request
In their own words
Mackerel
Mackerel is a cloud-based SaaS service for monitoring servers and team-managed infrastructure. Installing its agent starts monitoring, after which hosts can be grouped into services and roles. It visualizes host metrics and user-defined service measures, including response time, sales and page views. Monitoring features include combining metrics, tracking predicted values and machine-learning anomaly detection. Cloud integrations cover Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; a container agent treats Amazon ECS tasks and Kubernetes pods as hosts. Users can extend monitoring with open-source plugins, APIs and the mkr command-line tool. Customer Reliability Engineers can offer technical guidance on implementation and use, while standard-plan technical support is email-only. The free plan has five standard and micro hosts total, 500 metrics, one-day retention, 10 monitoring rules, one dashboard and up to 5M trace spans. A two-week trial includes Standard-plan functions and a 100M-span allowance. Standard host usage costs 2,180 yen, tax included, per host month.
Netdata
Netdata is an observability platform for real-time infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. Its agent gathers metrics and logs and provides per-second monitoring, machine-learning anomaly detection, dashboards, and alerts. Netdata lists more than 800 collectors and notification channels, including Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, email, and webhooks. The agent can ingest Prometheus, OpenMetrics, StatsD, and OpenTelemetry data and export to Prometheus Remote Write, InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, and TimescaleDB. Organizations can use the managed cloud platform or deploy on premises, including in air-gapped environments. Netdata says metrics remain on the user's infrastructure while only metadata reaches the cloud. Native Android and iOS apps provide alerts and notifications. The Community plan is free, with up to five active connected nodes and one active custom dashboard per room. Signing up for Netdata Cloud includes a 14-day Business trial for any number of nodes with no limits. Business costs $4.50 per month billed annually, with a stated total of $540.00/year.