head to head · open source
Grafana vs litter
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. litter has 1,655 stars, 61 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,591% (77,638 vs 1,655 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; litter is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, litter 4%. 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 | litter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 61 |
| 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 litter if
- You want the litter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and litter 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 litter
Litter Litter is a pretty printer library for Go data structures to aid in debugging and testing. Litter is provided by Sanity: The Headless CMS Construction Kit Litter named for the fact that it outputs literals , which you litter your output with. As a side benefit, all Litter output is syntactically correct Go. You can use Litter to emit data during debug, and it's also really nice for "snapshot data" in unit tests, since it produces consistent, sorted output. Litter was inspired by Spew, but focuses on terseness and readability. Basic example This: will output: Use in tests Litter is a great alternative to…
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or litter more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and litter has 1,655. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and litter free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and litter under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and litter?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and litter 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 litter?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.