---
title: "Grafana OSS | Grafana Labs"
description: "What you get and what you don't with the free, open source edition"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## What you get

Grafana OSS is free, open source software that provides:

- Dashboards with variables, annotations, and dozens of visualization types
- Alerting with notification channels (email, Slack, PagerDuty, and more)
- A query editor and Explore mode for ad-hoc data investigation
- A plugin framework with hundreds of community data sources and panels
- Configuration through files, environment variables, or provisioning scripts

> **Note:** You can also use **Grafana Assistant**, the purpose-built AI assistant, with self-hosted Grafana OSS. Install the Assistant plugin and connect a free or paid Grafana Cloud account: the assistant runs in your instance while its backend stays in Grafana Cloud.

## What you don’t get

The free edition leaves out a few things:

- No official support. Community forums are the primary help channel.
- No enterprise governance features
- No managed infrastructure. You run and operate everything yourself.

## The cost of running it yourself

Free to license doesn’t mean free to run. Self-hosting OSS carries real, ongoing costs:

| Cost type          | What it looks like                                                                                          |
|--------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Infrastructure** | Setup, configuration, scaling, and ongoing maintenance at scale                                             |
| **Engineering**    | Full-time engineers (FTEs) dedicated to installation, administration, and upgrades, instead of product work |
| **Opportunity**    | Innovation slows when engineers keep the lights on rather than ship features                                |
| **Downtime**       | No guaranteed SLAs or 24/7 support, and the risk of running blind during an incident                        |

## Best for

Individuals and small teams comfortable managing infrastructure, with no need for commercial support.

## Get started

Download Grafana OSS and follow the installation guide.

- [Download Grafana OSS](/grafana/download?edition=oss)
- [Installation guide](/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/installation/)