head to head · open source
Grafana vs magic-trace
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. magic-trace has 6,345 stars, 222 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,124% (77,638 vs 6,345 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 222 |
| 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 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
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 magic-trace
magic trace Overview magic trace collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. People have used it to: figure out why an application running in production handles some requests slowly while simultaneously handling a sea of uninteresting requests, look at what their code is actually doing instead of what they think it's doing, get a history of what their application was doing before it crashed, instead of a mere stacktrace at that final instant, ...and much more! magic trace: has 2% 10% overhead, doesn't require application changes to use, traces every function call with 40ns…
read the full magic-trace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or magic-trace more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,345. 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 (77,638 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.