head to head · open source
Grafana vs alertmanager
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. alertmanager has 8,613 stars, 2,469 forks, 419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 792% (76,792 vs 8,613 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; alertmanager is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, alertmanager 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 (hacktoberfest, 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 | alertmanager | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 8.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| 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 alertmanager if
- You want the alertmanager 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 alertmanager 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 alertmanager
Prometheus Alertmanager is the Go based, Apache 2.0 alert routing service that receives alerts from client applications such as the Prometheus server, deduplicates and groups them, and routes them to receivers including email, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Slack and a generic webhook — it is for operations and platform teams that already run Prometheus and need notifications that are neither duplicated nor noisy.
read the full alertmanager overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or alertmanager more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and alertmanager has 8,613. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and alertmanager free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and alertmanager under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and alertmanager?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and alertmanager 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 alertmanager?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose alertmanager if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.