head to head · open source
Grafana vs beszel
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel has 26,783 stars, 1,138 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 190% (77,638 vs 26,783 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; beszel is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, beszel 4%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Grafana | beszel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 27K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick beszel if
- You want the beszel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and beszel fits your workflow better
About Grafana
The open source platform for monitoring and observability Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture: Visualizations: Fast and flexible client side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs. Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic & reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad hoc queries and dynamic…
read the full Grafana overview →
About beszel
Beszel Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform that includes Docker statistics, historical data, and alert functions. It has a friendly web interface, simple configuration, and is ready to use out of the box. It supports automatic backup, multi user, OAuth authentication, and API access. Features Lightweight : Smaller and less resource intensive than leading solutions. Simple : Easy setup with little manual configuration required. Docker stats : Tracks CPU, memory, and network usage history for each container. ZFS : Tracks pool capacity, health, and I/O, plus per dataset usage. Alerts : Configurable…
read the full beszel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or beszel more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and beszel has 26,783. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and beszel free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and beszel under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and beszel?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and beszel in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Grafana or beszel?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose beszel if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.