head to head · open source
Grafana vs Gatus
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Gatus has 12,481 stars, 885 forks, 382 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 522% (77,638 vs 12,481 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Gatus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Gatus 7%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (alerting, dashboard, go, monitoring), 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 | Gatus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 885 |
| 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 Gatus if
- You want the Gatus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Gatus 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 Gatus
Gatus is a developer oriented health dashboard that gives you the ability to monitor your services using HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and even DNS queries as well as evaluate the result of said queries by using a list of conditions on values like the status code, the response time, the certificate expiration, the body and many others. The icing on top is that each of these health checks can be paired with alerting via Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Discord, Twilio and many more. I personally deploy it in my Kubernetes cluster and let it monitor the status of my core applications: Looking for a managed solution? Check out…
read the full Gatus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Gatus more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and Gatus has 12,481. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and Gatus free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Gatus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and Gatus?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and Gatus 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 Gatus?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Gatus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.