head to head · open source
Grafana vs karma
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. karma has 2,693 stars, 206 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,783% (77,638 vs 2,693 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 206 |
| 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 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
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 karma
karma Alert dashboard for Prometheus Alertmanager. Alertmanager =0.22.0 is required. See GitHub Releases for release changelog. Feature overview Alertmanager UI is useful for browsing alerts and managing silences, but it's lacking as a dashboard tool karma aims to fill this gap. Alert aggregation and deduplication Starting with the 0.7.0 release it can aggregate alerts from multiple Alertmanager instances, running either in HA mode or separate. Unique alerts are displayed by filtering duplicates. Each alert is tagged with the names of all Alertmanager instances it was found at and can be filtered based on those…
read the full karma overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or karma more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and karma has 2,693. 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 (77,638 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.