head to head · open source
Grafana vs lnav
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lnav has 10,777 stars, 414 forks, 295 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 620% (77,638 vs 10,777 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; lnav is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, lnav 4%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | lnav | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 11K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 414 |
| 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 lnav if
- You want the lnav feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and lnav 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 lnav
This is the source repository for lnav , visit for a high level overview. LNAV The Logfile Navigator The Logfile Navigator is a log file viewer for the terminal. Given a set of files/directories, lnav will: decompress as needed; detect their format; merge the files by time into a single view; tail the files, follow renames, find new files in directories; build an index of errors and warnings; pretty print JSON lines. Then, in the lnav TUI, you can: jump quickly to the previous/next error (press e / E ); search using regular expressions (press / ); highlight text with a regular expression ( :highlight command)…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or lnav more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and lnav has 10,777. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and lnav free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and lnav under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and lnav?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and lnav in C++. 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 lnav?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose lnav if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.