head to head · open source
Grafana vs calico
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. calico has 7,409 stars, 1,619 forks, 279 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 948% (77,638 vs 7,409 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; calico is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, calico 22%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | calico | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 7.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 calico if
- You want the calico 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 calico 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 calico
Calico Quickstart Docs Contribute Slack Releases 🐾 Welcome to Project Calico! Project Calico, created and maintained by [Tigera][tigera], is an open source project with an active development and user community. Calico Open Source has grown to be the most widely adopted solution for container networking and security, powering 8M+ nodes daily across 166 countries. 🌟 Why use Calico? Data Plane Choice : eBPF, standard Linux, Windows, and VPP — versatility in network solutions. Interoperability : Works across multiple distros, multiple clouds, bare metal, and VMs. Optimized Performance : Engineered for high speed…
read the full calico overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or calico more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and calico has 7,409. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and calico free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and calico under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and calico?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and calico 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 calico?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose calico if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.