head to head · open source
Grafana vs agent
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. agent has 1,743 stars, 511 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,306% (76,792 vs 1,743 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; agent is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, agent 29%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (grafana, 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 | agent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-07-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 511 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 77K 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 agent if
- You want the agent feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and agent fits your workflow better
About Grafana
Grafana is an open source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces across diverse data sources. It runs in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, designed for teams needing unified visibility into system behavior without vendor lock in. Built with TypeScript and Go, it provides a composable architecture that integrates with existing toolchains.
read the full Grafana overview →
About agent
Grafana Agent is a vendor neutral, OpenTelemetry Collector distribution that wires programmable components into pipelines for collecting, transforming, and shipping metrics, logs, traces, and continuous profiles, aimed at platform and observability engineers who route telemetry across the Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana open source ecosystems.
read the full agent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or agent more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and agent has 1,743. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and agent free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and agent under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and agent?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and agent 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 agent?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose agent if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.