head to head · open source
Grafana vs micrometer
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. micrometer has 4,909 stars, 1,154 forks, 309 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,482% (77,638 vs 4,909 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; micrometer is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, micrometer 24%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (metrics, monitoring), 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 | micrometer | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 micrometer if
- You want the micrometer feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and micrometer 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 micrometer
Micrometer Application Metrics An application metrics facade for the most popular monitoring tools. Instrument your code with dimensional metrics with a vendor neutral interface and decide on the monitoring backend at the last minute. More info on micrometer.io. Micrometer artifacts work with Java 8 or later with a few exceptions such as the micrometer java11 module and micrometer jetty11. Supported versions See Micrometer's support policy. Join the discussion Join the Micrometer Slack to share your questions, concerns, and feature requests. Snapshot builds Snapshots are published to repo.spring.io for every…
read the full micrometer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or micrometer more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and micrometer has 4,909. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and micrometer free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and micrometer under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and micrometer?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and micrometer in Java. 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 micrometer?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose micrometer if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.