head to head · open source
Grafana vs gtop
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gtop has 9,934 stars, 339 forks, 40 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 682% (77,638 vs 9,934 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; gtop is written in JavaScript under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, gtop 3%. 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.
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Side by side
| Grafana | gtop | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 9.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 339 |
| 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 gtop if
- You want the gtop feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and gtop 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 gtop
gtop System monitoring dashboard for terminal. Requirements Linux / OSX / Windows (partial support) Node.js = v8 Installation Docker You need to assign host net and pid to access the metrics in the host machine. Usage Start gtop with the gtop command To stop gtop use q , or ctrl+c in most shell environments. You can sort the process table by pressing p : Process Id c : CPU usage m : Memory usage Troubleshooting If you see question marks or other different characters, try to run it with these environment variables: License Released under the MIT license.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or gtop more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and gtop has 9,934. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and gtop free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and gtop under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and gtop?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and gtop 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 gtop?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose gtop if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.