head to head · open source
Grafana vs kube-state-metrics
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kube-state-metrics has 6,234 stars, 2,201 forks, 109 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,145% (77,638 vs 6,234 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; kube-state-metrics is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, kube-state-metrics 35%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (metrics, 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 | kube-state-metrics | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 kube-state-metrics if
- You want the kube-state-metrics feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and kube-state-metrics 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 kube-state-metrics
Overview kube state metrics (KSM) is a simple service that listens to the Kubernetes API server and generates metrics about the state of the objects. (See examples in the Metrics section below.) It is not focused on the health of the individual Kubernetes components, but rather on the health of the various objects inside, such as deployments, nodes and pods. kube state metrics is about generating metrics from Kubernetes API objects without modification. This ensures that features provided by kube state metrics have the same grade of stability as the Kubernetes API objects themselves. In turn, this means that…
read the full kube-state-metrics overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or kube-state-metrics more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and kube-state-metrics has 6,234. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and kube-state-metrics free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and kube-state-metrics under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and kube-state-metrics?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and kube-state-metrics 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 kube-state-metrics?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kube-state-metrics if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.