head to head · open source
Grafana vs metrics
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. metrics has 17,202 stars, 2,275 forks, 68 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 346% (76,791 vs 17,202 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; metrics is written in JavaScript under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, metrics 13%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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 | metrics | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-05-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| 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 metrics if
- You want the metrics feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and metrics 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 metrics
Metrics is an infographics generator for GitHub accounts, published under the MIT license and written in JavaScript. It lives in the GitHub ecosystem as a GitHub Action and as a hosted web service, and it produces statistics about a user, an organization, or a repository. The output is rendered as SVG, Markdown, PDF, or JSON, which means the same generated figures can be embedded in a profile readme, attached to a blog post, or consumed by another tool.
read the full metrics overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or metrics more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and metrics has 17,202. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and metrics free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and metrics under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and metrics?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and metrics in JavaScript. 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 metrics?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose metrics if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.