head to head · open source
beszel vs OpenObserve
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenObserve has 21,993 stars, 1,091 forks, 598 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel leads on adoption by 16% (25,459 vs 21,993 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; OpenObserve is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, OpenObserve 5%. OpenObserve was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| beszel | OpenObserve | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 22K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick OpenObserve if
- You want the OpenObserve feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and OpenObserve fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About OpenObserve
OpenObserve is an open source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, analytics, Real User Monitoring, session replay, pipelines, SLO, and LLM observability. It lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem and is described as an alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch. The project is built in Rust, ships as a single binary, and uses Parquet columnar storage with an S3 native design.
read the full OpenObserve overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or OpenObserve more popular?
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars and OpenObserve has 21,993. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and OpenObserve free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and OpenObserve under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and OpenObserve?
beszel is written in Go and OpenObserve in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, beszel or OpenObserve?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,459 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose OpenObserve if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.