head to head · open source
Grafana vs lnav
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lnav has 10,675 stars, 403 forks, 295 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 619% (76,791 vs 10,675 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | lnav | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 11K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 403 |
| 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 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
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 lnav
lnav is a log file viewer for the terminal that decompresses, detects the format of, merges, indexes and queries log files in one interactive text interface, built for developers, system administrators and support engineers who diagnose systems from the command line.
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or lnav more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and lnav has 10,675. 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 (76,791 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.