head to head · open source
Grafana vs effect
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. effect has 17,464 stars, 892 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 345% (77,638 vs 17,464 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; effect is written in TypeScript under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, effect 5%. 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 | effect | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 892 |
| 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 effect if
- You want the effect feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and effect 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 effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or effect more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and effect has 17,464. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and effect free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and effect under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and effect?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and effect in TypeScript. 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 effect?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose effect if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.