head to head · open source
Grafana vs orchestrion
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. orchestrion has 625 stars, 40 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 12,322% (77,638 vs 625 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; orchestrion is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, orchestrion 6%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (go, 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 | orchestrion | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 625 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 40 |
| 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 orchestrion if
- You want the orchestrion 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 orchestrion 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 orchestrion
Orchestrion Automatic compile time instrumentation of Go code. Overview Orchestrion processes Go source code at compilation time and automatically inserts instrumentation. This instrumentation is driven by the imports present in the orchestrion.tool.go file at the project's root. [!IMPORTANT] Should you encounter issues or a bug when using orchestrion , please report it in the [bug tracker][gh issues]. For support & general questions, you are welcome to use [GitHub discussions][gh discussions]. You may also contact us privately via Datadog support. [gh issues]: [gh discussions]: Requirements Orchestrion supports…
read the full orchestrion overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or orchestrion more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and orchestrion has 625. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and orchestrion free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and orchestrion under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and orchestrion?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and orchestrion 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 orchestrion?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose orchestrion if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.