head to head · open source
Grafana vs pinpoint
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinpoint has 13,871 stars, 3,736 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 460% (77,638 vs 13,871 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, pinpoint 27%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | pinpoint | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.7K |
| 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 pinpoint if
- You want the pinpoint feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and pinpoint 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 pinpoint
Latest Release (2026/05/21) We're happy to announce the release of Pinpoint v3.1.0. Please check the release note at ( The current stable version is v3.1.0. Live Demo Take a quick look at Pinpoint with our demo! PHP, PYTHON Pinpoint also supports application written in PHP, Python. Check out our agent repository. About Pinpoint Pinpoint is an APM (Application Performance Management) tool for large scale distributed systems written in Java / PHP/PYTHON). Inspired by Dapper, Pinpoint provides a solution to help analyze the overall structure of the system and how components within them are interconnected by tracing…
read the full pinpoint overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or pinpoint more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and pinpoint has 13,871. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and pinpoint free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pinpoint under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and pinpoint?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and pinpoint in Java. 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 pinpoint?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pinpoint if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.