head to head · open source
Grafana vs opentelemetry-collector
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opentelemetry-collector has 7,729 stars, 2,327 forks, 696 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 905% (77,638 vs 7,729 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; opentelemetry-collector is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-collector 30%. 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 | opentelemetry-collector | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 7.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| 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 opentelemetry-collector if
- You want the opentelemetry-collector 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 opentelemetry-collector 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 opentelemetry-collector
Getting Started • Getting Involved • Getting In Touch Vision • Configuration • Monitoring • Security • Package OpenTelemetry Collector The OpenTelemetry Collector offers a vendor agnostic implementation on how to receive, process and export telemetry data. In addition, it removes the need to run, operate and maintain multiple agents/collectors in order to support open source telemetry data formats (e.g. Jaeger, Prometheus, etc.) to multiple open source or commercial back ends. Objectives: Usable: Reasonable default configuration, supports popular protocols, runs and collects out of…
read the full opentelemetry-collector overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or opentelemetry-collector more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-collector has 7,729. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and opentelemetry-collector free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and opentelemetry-collector under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and opentelemetry-collector?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and opentelemetry-collector 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 opentelemetry-collector?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-collector if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.