head to head · open source
Grafana vs karma
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. karma has 2,682 stars, 203 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,763% (76,792 vs 2,682 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; karma is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, karma 8%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (alerting, dashboard, 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 | karma | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 203 |
| 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 karma if
- You want the karma feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and karma 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 karma
karma is an open source alert dashboard for Prometheus Alertmanager, written in TypeScript and released under the Apache 2.0 licence, built for teams that run Prometheus based alerting and find the Alertmanager UI too limited for day to day alert triage.
read the full karma overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or karma more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and karma has 2,682. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and karma free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and karma under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and karma?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and karma in TypeScript. 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 karma?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose karma if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.