head to head · open source
Grafana vs pyroscope
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pyroscope has 11,661 stars, 802 forks, 400 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 559% (76,791 vs 11,661 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; pyroscope is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, pyroscope 7%. 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 | pyroscope | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 802 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 77K 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 pyroscope if
- You want the pyroscope 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 pyroscope fits your workflow better
About Grafana
Grafana is an open source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces across diverse data sources. It runs in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, designed for teams needing unified visibility into system behavior without vendor lock in. Built with TypeScript and Go, it provides a composable architecture that integrates with existing toolchains.
read the full Grafana overview →
About pyroscope
Grafana Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform for developers, SREs, and platform teams who need to find CPU, memory, and I/O bottlenecks in running applications and trace them down to a single line of code.
read the full pyroscope overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or pyroscope more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and pyroscope has 11,661. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and pyroscope free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pyroscope under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and pyroscope?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and pyroscope 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 pyroscope?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pyroscope if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.