head to head · open source
Grafana vs kapacitor
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kapacitor has 2,377 stars, 479 forks, 834 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 3,131% (76,792 vs 2,377 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; kapacitor is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, kapacitor 20%. 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 | kapacitor | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 479 |
| 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 kapacitor if
- You want the kapacitor feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and kapacitor 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 kapacitor
Kapacitor is an open source, MIT licensed framework written in Go for processing, monitoring, and alerting on time series data, built for operators and platform engineers who store metrics in InfluxDB and need rule based stream and batch processing on top of them.
read the full kapacitor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or kapacitor more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and kapacitor has 2,377. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and kapacitor free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and kapacitor under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and kapacitor?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and kapacitor 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 kapacitor?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kapacitor if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.