head to head · open source
Grafana vs grafana-dashboards
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. grafana-dashboards has 2,889 stars, 1,540 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,558% (76,792 vs 2,889 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; grafana-dashboards is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, grafana-dashboards 53%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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.
← all 13541 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | grafana-dashboards | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 2.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-04-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 grafana-dashboards if
- You want the grafana-dashboards feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and grafana-dashboards 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 grafana-dashboards
Grafana dashboards for efficient database monitoring is a curated set of Grafana dashboard definitions for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ProxySQL, and HAProxy that ships as part of Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), written in TypeScript under the AGPL 3.0 licence, and aimed at database administrators and site reliability engineers who run those engines in production.
read the full grafana-dashboards overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or grafana-dashboards more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and grafana-dashboards has 2,889. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and grafana-dashboards free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and grafana-dashboards under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and grafana-dashboards?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and grafana-dashboards in TypeScript. 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 grafana-dashboards?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose grafana-dashboards if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.