head to head · open source
Grafana vs micrometer
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. micrometer has 4,902 stars, 1,150 forks, 309 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,467% (76,792 vs 4,902 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 23%. 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 | ★ 77K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 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
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 micrometer
Micrometer is a vendor neutral application observability facade for Java that lets developers instrument code with dimensional metrics once and decide on the monitoring backend at the last minute, and it is aimed at Java teams building cloud native and microservice applications that want observability without tying their instrumentation to a single monitoring tool.
read the full micrometer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or micrometer more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and micrometer has 4,902. 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 (76,792 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.