head to head · open source
Grafana vs nginx-lua-prometheus
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx-lua-prometheus has 1,573 stars, 239 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,836% (77,638 vs 1,573 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Lua |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 239 |
| 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 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
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 nginx-lua-prometheus
Prometheus metric library for Nginx This is a Lua library that can be used with Nginx to keep track of metrics and expose them on a separate web page to be pulled by Prometheus. Installation To use this library, you will need the ngx lua nginx module. You can either use a lua enabled nginx based server like OpenResty, or a regular nginx server with the module enabled: for example, on Debian 10 you can simply install libnginx mod http lua (but please read the known issues if you use a later Debian version). The library file prometheus.lua needs to be available in LUA PATH . If this is the only Lua library you…
read the full nginx-lua-prometheus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or nginx-lua-prometheus more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and nginx-lua-prometheus has 1,573. 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 (77,638 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.