head to head · open source
Grafana vs cilium
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,759 stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 201% (77,638 vs 25,759 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. cilium 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 | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| 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 cilium if
- You want the cilium 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 cilium 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 cilium
.. raw:: html Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF based dataplane. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode. It is L7 protocol aware and can enforce network policies on L3 L7 using an identity based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between pods and to external services, and is able to fully replace kube proxy, using efficient hash tables in eBPF, allowing for almost unlimited scale. It also supports advanced…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or cilium more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,759. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and cilium free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cilium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and cilium?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and cilium 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 cilium?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.