head to head · open source
Grafana vs cilium
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 204% (76,791 vs 25,232 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%. 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 | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 25K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 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
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 cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or cilium more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. 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 (76,791 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.