head to head · open source
Grafana vs alertmanager
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. alertmanager has 8,677 stars, 2,495 forks, 419 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 795% (77,638 vs 8,677 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 8.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| 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 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
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 alertmanager
Alertmanager [ ][circleci] [ ][quay] [ ][hub] The Alertmanager handles alerts sent by client applications such as the Prometheus server. It takes care of deduplicating, grouping, and routing them to the correct receiver integrations such as email, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or many other mechanisms thanks to the webhook receiver. It also takes care of silencing and inhibition of alerts. Documentation Install There are various ways of installing Alertmanager. Precompiled binaries Precompiled binaries for released versions are available in the download section on prometheus.io. Using the latest production release binary…
read the full alertmanager overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or alertmanager more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and alertmanager has 8,677. 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 (77,638 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.