head to head · open source
Grafana vs pcm
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pcm has 3,353 stars, 532 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 19 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,215% (77,638 vs 3,353 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; pcm is written in C++ under BSD-3-Clause. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, pcm 16%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | pcm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 3.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 532 |
| 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 pcm if
- You want the pcm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and pcm 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 pcm
Intel® Performance Counter Monitor (Intel® PCM) PCM Tools Building PCM Downloading Pre Compiled PCM FAQ API Documentation Environment Variables Compilation Options Intel® Performance Counter Monitor (Intel® PCM) is an application programming interface (API) and a set of tools based on the API to monitor performance and energy metrics of Intel® Core™, Xeon®, Atom™ and Xeon Phi™ processors. PCM works on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD and ChromeOS operating systems. Github repository statistics: We welcome bug reports and enhancement requests, which can be submitted…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or pcm more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and pcm has 3,353. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and pcm free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pcm under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and pcm?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and pcm in C++. 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 pcm?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pcm if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.