head to head · open source
Grafana vs NLog
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NLog has 6,546 stars, 1,377 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,086% (77,638 vs 6,546 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; NLog is written in C# under BSD-3-Clause. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, NLog 21%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | NLog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 NLog if
- You want the NLog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and NLog 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 NLog
NLog is a free logging platform for .NET with rich log routing and management capabilities. It makes it easy to produce and manage high quality logs for your application regardless of its size or complexity. Handles both structured logging and traditional logging from any .NET language, augment with contextual information, format according to your preference and send them to one or more targets such as file or console. Major and minor releases will be posted on project news. Getting started .NET Framework ASP.NET Core .NET Core Console For the possible options in the config, check the Options list and API…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or NLog more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and NLog has 6,546. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and NLog free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and NLog under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and NLog?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and NLog in C#. 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 NLog?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose NLog if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.