head to head · open source
Grafana vs ali
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ali has 3,939 stars, 151 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,850% (76,792 vs 3,939 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.
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Side by side
| Grafana | ali | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-01-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 151 |
| 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 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
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 ali
ali is a Go command line load testing tool that generates HTTP traffic against a target and plots the resulting metrics live in an embedded terminal UI, built for developers and operators who need to watch how a service behaves while the load is still running instead of reading a report afterwards.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or ali more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and ali has 3,939. 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 (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose ali if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.