head to head · open source
Grafana vs lazyjournal
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lazyjournal has 1,406 stars, 34 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 5,362% (76,792 vs 1,406 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; lazyjournal is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, lazyjournal 2%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (go), 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 | lazyjournal | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 34 |
| 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 lazyjournal if
- You want the lazyjournal feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and lazyjournal 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 lazyjournal
lazyjournal is a terminal user interface, written in Go, for reading and filtering logs from journald, auditd, the file system, Docker and Podman containers, Compose stacks and Kubernetes pods, and it is aimed at system administrators, SREs and developers who need to inspect logs from many different sources without leaving the terminal.
read the full lazyjournal overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or lazyjournal more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and lazyjournal has 1,406. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and lazyjournal free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and lazyjournal under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and lazyjournal?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and lazyjournal 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 lazyjournal?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose lazyjournal if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.