head to head · open source
Grafana vs kubetail
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kubetail has 1,801 stars, 133 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,211% (77,638 vs 1,801 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; kubetail is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, kubetail 7%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | kubetail | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 133 |
| 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 kubetail if
- You want the kubetail 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 kubetail 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 kubetail
Kubetail Kubetail is a real time logging dashboard for Kubernetes Demo: English 简体中文 日本語 한국어 Deutsch Español Português Français Introduction Kubetail is a general purpose logging dashboard for Kubernetes, optimized for tailing logs across multi container workloads in real time. With Kubetail, you can view logs from all the containers in a workload (e.g. Deployment or DaemonSet) merged into a single, chronological timeline, delivered to your browser or terminal. The primary entry point for Kubetail is the kubetail CLI tool, which can launch a local web dashboard on your desktop or stream raw logs directly to your…
read the full kubetail overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or kubetail more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and kubetail has 1,801. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and kubetail free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and kubetail under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and kubetail?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and kubetail 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 kubetail?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kubetail if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.