head to head · open source
Grafana vs frostmourne
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. frostmourne has 1,494 stars, 317 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 5,040% (76,792 vs 1,494 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; frostmourne is written in Java under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, frostmourne 21%. 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, influxdb), 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 | frostmourne | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-04-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 317 |
| 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 frostmourne if
- You want the frostmourne feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and frostmourne 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 frostmourne
Frostmourne（霜之哀伤监控平台）is an MIT licensed, Java based distributed monitoring and alerting system that turns queries against Elasticsearch, Prometheus, SkyWalking, InfluxDB, MySQL/TiDB, ClickHouse, SqlServer and IoTDB data into alarms, and it is built for operations and development teams that already run a log or metrics stack but lack a matching alerting layer.
read the full frostmourne overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or frostmourne more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and frostmourne has 1,494. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and frostmourne free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and frostmourne under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and frostmourne?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and frostmourne in Java. 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 frostmourne?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose frostmourne if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.