head to head · open source
Grafana vs opentelemetry-go
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opentelemetry-go has 6,593 stars, 1,527 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,078% (77,638 vs 6,593 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; opentelemetry-go is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-go 23%. 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 | opentelemetry-go | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 6.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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-go if
- You want the opentelemetry-go 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-go 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-go
OpenTelemetry Go OpenTelemetry Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry. It provides a set of APIs to directly measure performance and behavior of your software and send this data to observability platforms. Project Status Progress and status specific to this repository is tracked in our project boards and milestones. Project versioning information and stability guarantees can be found in the versioning documentation. [^1]: Compatibility OpenTelemetry Go ensures compatibility with the current supported versions of the Go language: Each major Go release is supported until there are two newer major releases…
read the full opentelemetry-go overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or opentelemetry-go more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-go has 6,593. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and opentelemetry-go free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and opentelemetry-go under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and opentelemetry-go?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and opentelemetry-go 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-go?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-go if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.