head to head · open source
Grafana vs psutil
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. psutil has 11,313 stars, 1,539 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 586% (77,638 vs 11,313 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; psutil is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, psutil 14%. 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.
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Side by side
| Grafana | psutil | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 11K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 psutil if
- You want the psutil feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and psutil 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 psutil
.. .. raw:: html Process and System Utilities for Python Documentation Blog Who uses psutil .. About ===== psutil is a cross platform library for retrieving information about running processes and system utilization (CPU, memory, disks, network, sensors) in Python. It is useful mainly for system monitoring , profiling , limiting process resources , and managing running processes . It implements many functionalities offered by UNIX command line tool such as ps, top, free, iotop, netstat, ifconfig, lsof and others (see shell equivalents ). Psutil supports the following platforms: Linux Windows macOS FreeBSD…
read the full psutil overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or psutil more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and psutil has 11,313. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and psutil free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and psutil under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and psutil?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and psutil 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 psutil?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose psutil if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.