head to head · open source
Grafana vs alerta
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. alerta has 2,529 stars, 374 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,936% (76,792 vs 2,529 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; alerta is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, alerta 15%. 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 | alerta | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-06-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 374 |
| 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 alerta if
- You want the alerta feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and alerta 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 alerta
Alerta is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed monitoring system in Python that aggregates alerts from any source into a single API driven server and web console, and it is aimed at operations and platform teams that want a scalable, low configuration alert aggregation layer instead of another polling based monitoring stack.
read the full alerta overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or alerta more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and alerta has 2,529. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and alerta free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and alerta under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and alerta?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and alerta in Python. 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 alerta?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose alerta if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.