head to head · open source
Grafana vs pmm
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pmm has 1,125 stars, 238 forks, 240 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 6,801% (77,638 vs 1,125 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; pmm is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, pmm 21%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (hacktoberfest, 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 | pmm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 238 |
| 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 pmm if
- You want the pmm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pmm 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 pmm
Percona Monitoring and Management Percona Monitoring and Management A single pane of glass to easily view and monitor the performance of your MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Valkey, and Redis databases. Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is the best of breed open source database monitoring solution. It helps you reduce complexity, optimize performance, and improve the security of your business critical database environments, no matter where they are located or deployed. PMM helps users to: Reduce Complexity Optimize Database Performance Improve Data Security See the PMM Documentation for more information. Use…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or pmm more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and pmm has 1,125. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and pmm free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pmm under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and pmm?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and pmm 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 pmm?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pmm if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.