head to head · open source
Grafana vs debug
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. debug has 11,456 stars, 997 forks, 96 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 578% (77,638 vs 11,456 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; debug is written in JavaScript under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, debug 9%. 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 | debug | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 11K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 997 |
| 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 debug if
- You want the debug feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and debug 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 debug
debug A tiny JavaScript debugging utility modelled after Node.js core's debugging technique. Works in Node.js and web browsers. Installation Usage debug exposes a function; simply pass this function the name of your module, and it will return a decorated version of console.error for you to pass debug statements to. This will allow you to toggle the debug output for different parts of your module as well as the module as a whole. Example app.js : Example worker.js : The DEBUG environment variable is then used to enable these based on space or comma delimited names. Here are some examples: Windows command prompt…
read the full debug overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or debug more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and debug has 11,456. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and debug free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and debug under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and debug?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and debug in JavaScript. 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 debug?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose debug if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.