Tool comparison
nines vs Sloth — SLO generator comparison
Both nines and Sloth generate Prometheus recording rules for multi-burn-rate SLOs, but they target different workflows. Sloth is a battle-tested CLI for engineering teams comfortable with YAML specs and CI/CD pipelines. nines is a web wizard that produces a richer artifact bundle — alerts, dashboard, runbook, and business-hours support — without requiring any local tooling.
| Feature | nines | Sloth | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web wizard | ✓ | — | nines walks you through each field; Sloth requires a hand-authored YAML spec. |
| Prometheus recording rules | ✓ | ✓ | Both emit compliant recording rules ready for Prometheus. |
| Multi-burn-rate alerts | ✓ | ✓ | Both implement the four-window, two-burn-rate Google SRE alert pattern. |
| Grafana dashboard | ✓ | ✓ | Both generate Grafana JSON dashboards; styles differ. |
| Runbook generation | ✓ | — | nines generates a Markdown runbook for each SLO; Sloth does not. |
| Business-hours SLI | ✓ | — | nines supports filtering availability measurements to business hours. |
| Alertmanager route config | ✓ | — | nines emits a ready-to-use Alertmanager routing block. |
| CI/CD / CLI workflow | — | ✓ | Sloth integrates naturally into automated pipelines; nines is UI-first. |
| Custom SLO spec (YAML) | — | ✓ | Sloth defines its own SLO spec; nines uses a structured form. |
| Open source | — | ✓ | Sloth is MIT-licensed; nines is a hosted service. |
Use nines when…
- ✓ Teams new to SLOs who want a guided, no-YAML setup.
- ✓ Quick one-off bootstrap that includes dashboard + alerts + runbook in one ZIP.
- ✓ Services that need business-hours availability filtering.
Use Sloth when…
- → Engineering teams with existing YAML-based config workflows.
- → CI/CD pipelines where SLO definitions are version-controlled as code.
- → Large fleets where a CLI batch-generates rules for many services.
Other comparisons
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Generate your first SLO bundle in under 3 minutes — no account required for the wizard.