head to head · open source
Grafana vs jaeger
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger has 23,217 stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 231% (76,791 vs 23,217 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, jaeger 13%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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 | jaeger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 23K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 jaeger if
- You want the jaeger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and jaeger 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 jaeger
Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it graduated as the 7th top level project in October 2019. It was originally created by Uber Technologies and then donated to the CNCF. The project is written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the OpenTelemetry and observability ecosystem: it consumes traces from OpenTelemetry SDKs and reuses components from the OpenTelemetry Collector. Its repository carries topics including cncf, distributed tracing, jaeger, observability, opentelemetry and tracing, and the project is openly gove…
read the full jaeger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or jaeger more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and jaeger has 23,217. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and jaeger free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and jaeger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and jaeger?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and jaeger in Go. 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 jaeger?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose jaeger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.