head to head · open source
Grafana vs cost-xray
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cost-xray has 2,046 stars, 202 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 3,653% (76,792 vs 2,046 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; cost-xray is written in Python under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, cost-xray 10%. 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 | cost-xray | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 202 |
| 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 cost-xray if
- You want the cost-xray feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and cost-xray 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 cost-xray
cost xray is an MIT licensed open source observability proxy for Claude Code and Codex that captures the API traffic those agents actually send and attributes every token and dollar back to the system prompts, tool schemas, MCP blocks, tool results, cache reads and writes, and thinking blocks that produced them.
read the full cost-xray overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or cost-xray more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and cost-xray has 2,046. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and cost-xray free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cost-xray under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and cost-xray?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and cost-xray in Python. 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 cost-xray?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cost-xray if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.