head to head · open source
Grafana vs datadog-agent
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. datadog-agent has 3,731 stars, 1,492 forks, 721 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,958% (76,791 vs 3,731 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; datadog-agent is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, datadog-agent 40%. datadog-agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (go, metrics, 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 | datadog-agent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 3.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 datadog-agent if
- You want the datadog-agent 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 datadog-agent 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 datadog-agent
The Datadog Agent repository is the main source repository for the Datadog Agent, which belongs to the Datadog observability ecosystem and is associated with monitoring, metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and profiling. The repository contains source code for Datadog Agent version 7 and version 6, and it points to Agent user documentation for differences among version 5, version 6, and version 7. It also links to prepackaged binaries and developer documentation.
read the full datadog-agent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or datadog-agent more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and datadog-agent has 3,731. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and datadog-agent free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and datadog-agent under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and datadog-agent?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and datadog-agent 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 datadog-agent?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose datadog-agent if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.