head to head · open source
Grafana vs clockwork
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. clockwork has 5,950 stars, 333 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,191% (76,791 vs 5,950 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; clockwork is written in PHP under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, clockwork 6%. 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 | clockwork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 333 |
| 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 clockwork if
- You want the clockwork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and clockwork 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 clockwork
Clockwork is a development tool for PHP that gives developers an insight into their application runtime — including request data, performance metrics, log entries, database queries, cache queries, redis commands, dispatched events, queued jobs and rendered views — right in the browser, and this repository contains its server side component.
read the full clockwork overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or clockwork more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and clockwork has 5,950. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and clockwork free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and clockwork under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and clockwork?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and clockwork in PHP. 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 clockwork?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose clockwork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.