head to head · open source
Grafana vs parca
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. parca has 4,971 stars, 259 forks, 206 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,445% (76,792 vs 4,971 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 | ★ 77K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 259 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 77K 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
Grafana is an open source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces across diverse data sources. It runs in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, designed for teams needing unified visibility into system behavior without vendor lock in. Built with TypeScript and Go, it provides a composable architecture that integrates with existing toolchains.
read the full Grafana overview →
About parca
Parca is an open source continuous profiling system that records CPU and memory usage down to the line number and across time, built for platform, SRE, and performance engineers who run production workloads on Kubernetes or systemd.
read the full parca overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or parca more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and parca has 4,971. 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 (76,792 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.