head to head · open source
Grafana vs kapacitor
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kapacitor has 2,378 stars, 475 forks, 834 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 3,165% (77,638 vs 2,378 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 475 |
| 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 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
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 kapacitor
Kapacitor Open source framework for processing, monitoring, and alerting on time series data Installation Kapacitor has two binaries: kapacitor – a CLI program for calling the Kapacitor API. kapacitord – the Kapacitor server daemon. You can either download the binaries directly from the downloads page or go get them: Configuration An example configuration file can be found here Kapacitor can also provide an example config for you using this command: Getting Started This README gives you a high level overview of what Kapacitor is and what its like to use it. As well as some details of how it works. To get started…
read the full kapacitor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or kapacitor more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and kapacitor has 2,378. 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 (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kapacitor if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.