head to head · open source
Grafana vs nerdlog
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nerdlog has 1,586 stars, 41 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,795% (77,638 vs 1,586 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; nerdlog is written in Go under BSD-2-Clause. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, nerdlog 3%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (go), 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 | nerdlog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 41 |
| 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 nerdlog if
- You want the nerdlog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and nerdlog 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 nerdlog
Nerdlog Nerdlog is a fast, remote first, multi host TUI log viewer with timeline histogram and no central server. Loosely inspired by Graylog/Kibana, but without the bloat. Pretty much no setup needed, either. It's laser focused on being efficient while querying logs from multiple remote machines simultaneously, filtering them by time range and patterns, while also drawing an interactive timeline histogram for quick visual insight. Primary use case: reading system logs (from the files /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog , or straight from journalctl ) from one or more remote hosts. Very efficient even on large…
read the full nerdlog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or nerdlog more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and nerdlog has 1,586. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and nerdlog free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and nerdlog under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and nerdlog?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and nerdlog in Go. 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 nerdlog?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose nerdlog if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.