head to head · open source
Grafana vs Prometheus
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus has 66,906 stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 16% (77,638 vs 66,906 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Prometheus 16%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (alerting, hacktoberfest, metrics, 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 | Prometheus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 67K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 11K |
| 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 Prometheus if
- You want the Prometheus 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 Prometheus 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 Prometheus
Prometheus Visit prometheus.io for the full documentation, examples and guides. [ ][quay] [ ][hub] Prometheus, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts when specified conditions are observed. The features that distinguish Prometheus from other metrics and monitoring systems are: A multi dimensional data model (time series defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions) PromQL, a powerful and flexible query language to…
read the full Prometheus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Prometheus more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and Prometheus has 66,906. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and Prometheus free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Prometheus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and Prometheus?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and Prometheus 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 Prometheus?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Prometheus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.