head to head · open source
Grafana vs file.d
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. file.d has 507 stars, 267 forks, 73 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 15,213% (77,638 vs 507 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; file.d is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, file.d 53%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (elasticsearch, go), 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 | file.d | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 507 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 267 |
| 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 file.d if
- You want the file.d feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and file.d 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 file.d
Overview file.d is a blazing fast tool for building data pipelines: read, process, and output events. Primarily developed to read from files, but also supports numerous input/action/output plugins. ⚠ Although we use it in production, it still isn't v1.0.0 . Please, test your pipelines carefully on dev/stage environments. Contributing file.d is an open source project and contributions are very welcome! Please make sure to read our contributing guide before creating an issue and opening a PR! Motivation Well, we already have several similar tools: vector, filebeat, logstash, fluend d, fluent bit, etc. Performance…
read the full file.d overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or file.d more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and file.d has 507. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and file.d free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and file.d under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and file.d?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and file.d in Go. 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 file.d?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose file.d if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.