head to head · open source
Grafana vs django-silk
Grafana has 77,397 GitHub stars, 14,887 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. django-silk has 4,996 stars, 378 forks, 130 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,449% (77,397 vs 4,996 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; django-silk is written in Python under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, django-silk 8%. 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 | django-silk | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-20 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 378 |
| 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 django-silk if
- You want the django-silk feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and django-silk 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 django-silk
Silk Silk is a live profiling and inspection tool for the Django framework. Silk intercepts and stores HTTP requests and database queries before presenting them in a user interface for further inspection: Contents Requirements Installation Features Configuration Authentication/Authorisation Request/Response bodies Meta Profiling Recording a fraction of requests Ignoring specific paths Limiting request/response data Clearing logged data Contributing Development Environment Requirements Silk has been tested with: Django: 5.2, 6.0, 6.1 Python: 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14, 3.15 Installation Via pip into a…
read the full django-silk overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or django-silk more popular?
Grafana has 77,397 GitHub stars and django-silk has 4,996. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and django-silk free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and django-silk under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and django-silk?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and django-silk 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 django-silk?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,397 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose django-silk if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.