head to head · open source
Grafana vs fsmon
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fsmon has 1,032 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 7,423% (77,638 vs 1,032 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; fsmon is written in C under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, fsmon 16%. 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 | fsmon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-04-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 162 |
| 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 fsmon if
- You want the fsmon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and fsmon 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 fsmon
fsmon Low level filesystem monitor utility for Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Author : pancake @ nowsecure License : MIT Designed for System administrators and incident responders Security researchers and forensic analysts Developers debugging I/O heavy applications Reverse engineers interested in observing filesystem access behavior Installation On macOS you can now install it via brew with these commands: Alternatively just run make or pick the builds from the release page. Usage The tool retrieves file system events from a specific directory and shows them in colorful format or in JSON. It is possible to…
read the full fsmon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or fsmon more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,032. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and fsmon free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and fsmon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and fsmon?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and fsmon 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 fsmon?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.