head to head · open source
Grafana vs PostHog
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. PostHog has 40,600 stars, 3,579 forks, 5,637 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 91% (77,638 vs 40,600 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; PostHog is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, PostHog 9%. PostHog was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (analytics), 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 | PostHog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 41K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.6K |
| 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 PostHog if
- You want the PostHog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and PostHog 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 PostHog
Docs Community Roadmap Why PostHog? Changelog Bug reports PostHog is the open source platform for building self driving products PostHog provides every tool you need to build a successful product, and captures all the context agents need to proactively diagnose problems, uncover opportunities, and ship fixes: Self driving mode: Turn signals in your product data (errors, rage clicks, failed queries, and more) into researched reports and pull requests you review and merge. Product analytics: Autocapture or manually instrument event based analytics to understand user behavior and analyze data with visualization or…
read the full PostHog 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 PostHog more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and PostHog has 40,600. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and PostHog free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and PostHog has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Grafana and PostHog?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and PostHog in Python. 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 PostHog?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose PostHog if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.