head to head · open source
Grafana vs perses
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. perses has 2,431 stars, 247 forks, 277 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 3,059% (76,792 vs 2,431 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; perses is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, perses 10%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (dashboard, 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 | perses | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 247 |
| 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 perses if
- You want the perses 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 perses 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 perses
Perses Overview Perses is first and foremost a dashboard tool that you can use to display a variety of observability data. It currently supports Prometheus metrics, Tempo traces, Loki for logs, Pyroscope for profiling, bringing together all four observability pillars in one place. As the project continues to evolve, it will expand support for additional tools to give users even more flexibility and insight. Perses is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project. Beyond its core usage, Perses aims to achieve several broader goals: Open specification for dashboards . Perses is also an initiative to define a …
read the full perses overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or perses more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and perses has 2,431. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and perses free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and perses under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and perses?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and perses 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 perses?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose perses if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.