head to head · open source
Grafana vs kubetail
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. kubetail has 1,761 stars, 126 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,261% (76,792 vs 1,761 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 | ★ 77K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-12 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 126 |
| 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 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
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 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 76,792 GitHub stars and kubetail has 1,761. 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 (76,792 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.