head to head · open source
Grafana vs parca
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. parca has 5,007 stars, 271 forks, 206 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,451% (77,638 vs 5,007 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; parca is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, parca 5%. 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 | parca | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 271 |
| 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 parca if
- You want the parca feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and parca 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 parca
Continuous profiling for analysis of CPU, memory usage over time, and down to the line number. Saving infrastructure cost, improving performance, and increasing reliability. Features eBPF Profiler : A single profiler, using eBPF, automatically discovering targets from Kubernetes or systemd across the entire infrastructure with very low overhead. Supports C, C++, Rust, Go, and more! Open Standards : Both producing pprof formatted profiles with the eBPF based profiler, and ingesting any pprof formatted profiles allowing for wide language adoption and interoperability with existing tooling. Optimized Storage &…
read the full parca overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or parca more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and parca has 5,007. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and parca free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and parca under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and parca?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and parca in TypeScript. 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 parca?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose parca if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.