head to head · open source
Grafana vs InfluxDB
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. InfluxDB has 31,748 stars, 3,718 forks, 2,165 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 142% (76,792 vs 31,748 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; InfluxDB is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, InfluxDB 12%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (go, influxdb, metrics, 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 | InfluxDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 32K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.7K |
| 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 InfluxDB if
- You want the InfluxDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and InfluxDB 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 InfluxDB
InfluxDB 3 Core is an open source time series database purpose built for real time ingestion, processing, and querying of event and metrics data. It lives in the InfluxDB ecosystem and is the latest major version, generally available since April 2025. Built with Rust and leveraging Apache Arrow, DataFusion, and Parquet, it replaces older versions (v1.x, v2.x) with a new architecture optimized for low latency analytics and interactive workloads.
read the full InfluxDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or InfluxDB more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and InfluxDB has 31,748. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and InfluxDB free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and InfluxDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and InfluxDB?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and InfluxDB in Rust. 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 InfluxDB?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose InfluxDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.