head to head · open source
Grafana vs nginx-lua-prometheus
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx-lua-prometheus has 1,566 stars, 238 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,804% (76,792 vs 1,566 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; nginx-lua-prometheus is written in Lua under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, nginx-lua-prometheus 15%. 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 | nginx-lua-prometheus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Lua |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 238 |
| 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 nginx-lua-prometheus if
- You want the nginx-lua-prometheus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You evaluated both and nginx-lua-prometheus 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 nginx-lua-prometheus
nginx lua prometheus is an MIT licensed Lua library that lets Nginx record counters, gauges, and histograms inside a shared dictionary and expose them on a dedicated HTTP endpoint for Prometheus to scrape, and it is aimed at operators running OpenResty or a Lua enabled Nginx who want to instrument the request path directly rather than through a sidecar.
read the full nginx-lua-prometheus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or nginx-lua-prometheus more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and nginx-lua-prometheus has 1,566. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and nginx-lua-prometheus free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and nginx-lua-prometheus under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and nginx-lua-prometheus?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and nginx-lua-prometheus in Lua. 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 nginx-lua-prometheus?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose nginx-lua-prometheus if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.