head to head · open source
Grafana vs graphite-web
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. graphite-web has 6,132 stars, 1,255 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 21 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,166% (77,638 vs 6,132 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; graphite-web is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, graphite-web 20%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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 | graphite-web | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 graphite-web if
- You want the graphite-web feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and graphite-web 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 graphite-web
Graphite Web Overview Graphite consists of three major components: 1. Graphite Web, a Django based web application that renders graphs and dashboards 2. The Carbon metric processing daemons 3. The Whisper time series database library Installation, Configuration and Usage Please refer to the instructions at readthedocs. License Graphite Web is licensed under version 2.0 of the Apache License. See the LICENSE file for details.
read the full graphite-web overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or graphite-web more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and graphite-web has 6,132. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and graphite-web free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and graphite-web under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and graphite-web?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and graphite-web in JavaScript. 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 graphite-web?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose graphite-web if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.