head to head · open source
Grafana vs InfluxDB
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. InfluxDB has 31,797 stars, 3,857 forks, 2,165 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 144% (77,638 vs 31,797 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 32K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.9K |
| 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 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
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 InfluxDB
InfluxDB 3 Core Open source time series database for real time events, analytics, and monitoring powered by Apache Arrow, DataFusion, and Parquet. InfluxDB 3 Core is a database built to collect, process, transform, and store event and time series data. It is ideal for use cases that require real time ingest and fast query response times to build user interfaces, monitoring, and automation solutions. Common use cases include: Monitoring sensor data Server monitoring Application performance monitoring Network monitoring Financial market and trading analytics Behavioral analytics InfluxDB is optimized for scenarios…
read the full InfluxDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or InfluxDB more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and InfluxDB has 31,797. 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 (77,638 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.