head to head · open source
Grafana vs magic-trace
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. magic-trace has 6,270 stars, 209 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,125% (76,791 vs 6,270 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; magic-trace is written in OCaml under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, magic-trace 3%. 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 | magic-trace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 209 |
| 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 magic-trace if
- You want the magic-trace feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches OCaml
- You evaluated both and magic-trace 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 magic-trace
magic trace is an open source tracing tool, written in OCaml and released under the MIT license, that collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. It lives in the Linux performance tooling ecosystem and sits alongside perf , which it uses under the hood to drive Intel Processor Trace. Rather than sampling call stacks throughout time, magic trace snapshots a ring buffer of all control flow leading up to a chosen point in time, then renders an interactive timeline of call stacks going back a configurable span of roughly 10ms, at approximately 40ns resolution.
read the full magic-trace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or magic-trace more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,270. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and magic-trace free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and magic-trace under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and magic-trace?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and magic-trace in OCaml. 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 magic-trace?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose magic-trace if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.