head to head · open source
Grafana vs plog
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. plog has 2,597 stars, 407 forks, 58 open issues and last shipped 28 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,890% (77,638 vs 2,597 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; plog is written in C++ under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, plog 16%. 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 | plog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 407 |
| 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 plog if
- You want the plog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and plog 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 plog
Plog portable, simple and extensible C++ logging library Pretty powerful logging library in about 1000 lines of code Introduction Hello log! Features Integration Copy the source Git submodule CMake integration add subdirectory FetchContent Package managers Usage Step 1: Adding includes Step 2: Initialization RollingFileInitializer ConsoleInitializer Manual initialization (Init.h) Step 3: Logging Basic logging macros Conditional logging macros Logger severity checker Advanced usage Changing severity at runtime Custom initialization Multiple appenders Multiple loggers Share log instances across modules (exe, dll…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or plog more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and plog has 2,597. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and plog free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and plog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and plog?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and plog 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 plog?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose plog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.