head to head · open source
Grafana vs alloy
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. alloy has 3,662 stars, 760 forks, 1,237 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,020% (77,638 vs 3,662 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; alloy is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, alloy 21%. alloy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (grafana, 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 | alloy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 3.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 760 |
| 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 alloy if
- You want the alloy 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 alloy 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 alloy
Grafana Alloy is an open source OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with built in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. What can Alloy do? Programmable pipelines : Use a rich [expression based syntax][syntax] for configuring powerful observability pipelines. OpenTelemetry Collector Distribution : Alloy is a [distribution][] of OpenTelemetry Collector and supports dozens of its components, alongside new components that make use of Alloy's programmable pipelines. Big tent : Alloy embraces Grafana's "big tent" philosophy, where Alloy can be used with other vendors or open source…
read the full alloy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or alloy more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and alloy has 3,662. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and alloy free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and alloy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and alloy?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and alloy 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 alloy?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose alloy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.