head to head · open source
Grafana vs pyroscope
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pyroscope has 11,710 stars, 833 forks, 400 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 563% (77,638 vs 11,710 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 | ★ 78K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 833 |
| 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 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
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 pyroscope
🎉 Announcement: Pyroscope 2.0 is here! Pyroscope 2.0 makes the new v2 architecture the default. Profiles are written directly to object storage, removing the need for in memory ingesters and local disks simplifying operations and lowering resource usage at scale. Existing v1 deployments can opt in via a flag and migrate without data loss. Read the 2.0 release notes and the v2 architecture overview. Upgrading from v1? See the migration guide. Want the full story? Watch the GrafanaCON 2026 talk Pyroscope 2.0: Continuous Profiling Architecture Deep Dive . What is Grafana Pyroscope? Grafana Pyroscope is a…
read the full pyroscope overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or pyroscope more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and pyroscope has 11,710. 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 (77,638 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.