head to head · open source
Grafana vs ali
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ali has 3,937 stars, 152 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,872% (77,638 vs 3,937 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; ali is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, ali 4%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (go, 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | ali | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-01-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 152 |
| 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 ali if
- You want the ali feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ali 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 ali
ali A load testing tool capable of performing real time analysis, inspired by vegeta and jplot. ali comes with an embedded terminal based UI where you can plot the metrics in real time, so lets you perform real time analysis on the terminal. Installation Binary releases are available through here. Via Homebrew Via MacPorts Via APT Via RPM Via Pacman Via APK After enabling the community repo: Via Go Note that you may have a problem because it downloads an untagged binary. Via Docker Usage Quickstart Replace with the target you want to issue the requests to. Press Enter when the UI appears, then the attack will be…
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or ali more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and ali has 3,937. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and ali free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and ali under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and ali?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and ali 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 ali?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose ali if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.