head to head · open source
Grafana vs beszel
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel has 25,459 stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 202% (76,791 vs 25,459 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; beszel is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, beszel 4%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | beszel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 25K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 beszel if
- You want the beszel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and beszel 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 beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or beszel more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and beszel has 25,459. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and beszel free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and beszel under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and beszel?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and beszel 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 beszel?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose beszel if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.