head to head · open source
Grafana vs FASTER
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. FASTER has 6,636 stars, 596 forks, 36 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,057% (76,791 vs 6,636 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; FASTER is written in C# under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, FASTER 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 | FASTER | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 6.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 596 |
| 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 FASTER if
- You want the FASTER feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and FASTER 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 FASTER
FASTER is an open source project from Microsoft that provides a fast persistent recoverable log and key value store plus cache, implemented in C and C++. It lives in the .NET ecosystem, with a parallel C++ implementation of the key value component, and is distributed primarily through the NuGet package Microsoft.FASTER.Core. The repository carries the MIT license and the project has been in development for roughly eight years, with topics covering concurrent and multi threaded operation, hash tables, indexing, key value storage, logging, persistence, and recoverability.
read the full FASTER overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or FASTER more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and FASTER has 6,636. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and FASTER free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and FASTER under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and FASTER?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and FASTER in C#. 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 FASTER?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose FASTER if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.