head to head · open source
Grafana vs jmx_exporter
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jmx_exporter has 3,334 stars, 1,226 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,229% (77,638 vs 3,334 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; jmx_exporter is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, jmx_exporter 37%. 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 | jmx_exporter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 jmx_exporter if
- You want the jmx_exporter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and jmx_exporter 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 jmx_exporter
JMX Exporter The JMX Exporter is a collector to capture JMX MBean values. Documentation Documentation can be found at JMX Exporter on prometheus.github.io Contributing and community See CONTRIBUTING.md and the community section of the Prometheus homepage. The Prometheus Java community is present on the CNCF Slack on prometheus java , and we have a fortnightly community call in the Prometheus public calendar. License Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.
read the full jmx_exporter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or jmx_exporter more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and jmx_exporter has 3,334. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and jmx_exporter free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and jmx_exporter under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and jmx_exporter?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and jmx_exporter in Java. 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 jmx_exporter?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose jmx_exporter if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.