head to head · open source
Grafana vs perses
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. perses has 2,514 stars, 266 forks, 277 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,988% (77,638 vs 2,514 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 11%. 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 266 |
| 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 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
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 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 77,638 GitHub stars and perses has 2,514. 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 (77,638 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.