head to head · open source
Grafana vs bottom
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. bottom has 14,149 stars, 402 forks, 103 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 449% (77,638 vs 14,149 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; bottom is written in Rust under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, bottom 3%. 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 | bottom | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 402 |
| 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 bottom if
- You want the bottom feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and bottom 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 bottom
bottom (btm) A customizable cross platform graphical process/system monitor for the terminal. Supports Linux, macOS, and Windows. Inspired by gtop , gotop , and htop . Demo using the Gruvbox theme ( theme gruvbox ), along with IBM Plex Mono and Kitty Table of contents Features Support Official Unofficial Installation Cargo Alpine Arch Linux Debian / Ubuntu Exherbo Linux Fedora / CentOS / AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux COPR Terra RPM Gentoo Nix openSUSE Snap Solus Void Homebrew MacPorts Chocolatey Scoop winget Windows installer (MSI) Conda gah ghr mise Pre built binaries Auto completion Usage Configuration…
read the full bottom overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or bottom more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and bottom has 14,149. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and bottom free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and bottom under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and bottom?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and bottom in Rust. 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 bottom?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose bottom if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.