head to head · open source
Grafana vs node_exporter
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node_exporter has 13,892 stars, 2,743 forks, 314 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 459% (77,638 vs 13,892 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; node_exporter is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, node_exporter 20%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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 | node_exporter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 2.7K |
| 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 node_exporter if
- You want the node_exporter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and node_exporter 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 node_exporter
Node exporter [ ][quay] [ ][hub] [ ][goreportcard] Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS metrics exposed by \ NIX kernels, written in Go with pluggable metric collectors. The Windows exporter is recommended for Windows users. To expose NVIDIA GPU metrics, prometheus dcgm can be used. Installation and Usage If you are new to Prometheus and node exporter there is a simple step by step guide. The node exporter listens on HTTP port 9100 by default. See the help output for more options. Linux distribution packages On Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux) and Fedora, node exporter is…
read the full node_exporter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or node_exporter more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and node_exporter has 13,892. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and node_exporter free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and node_exporter under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and node_exporter?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and node_exporter 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 node_exporter?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose node_exporter if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.