head to head · open source
Grafana vs eliot
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. eliot has 1,189 stars, 75 forks, 120 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 6,430% (77,638 vs 1,189 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; eliot is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, eliot 6%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (elasticsearch), 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 | eliot | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 75 |
| 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 eliot if
- You want the eliot feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and eliot 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 eliot
Eliot: Logging that tells you why it happened ================================================ Python's built in logging and other similar systems output a stream of factoids: they're interesting, but you can't really tell what's going on. Why is your application slow? What caused this code path to be chosen? Why did this error happen? Standard logging can't answer these questions. But with a better model you could understand what and why things happened in your application. You could pinpoint performance bottlenecks, you could understand what happened when, who called what. That is what Eliot does. eliot is a…
read the full eliot overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or eliot more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and eliot has 1,189. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and eliot free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and eliot under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and eliot?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and eliot 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 eliot?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose eliot if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.