head to head · open source
Grafana vs quill
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. quill has 3,077 stars, 275 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,423% (77,638 vs 3,077 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; quill is written in C++ under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, quill 9%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | quill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 275 |
| 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 quill if
- You want the quill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and quill 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 quill
Quill Ultra Low Latency Asynchronous C++17 Logging and Metrics Library 🔬 Try It Online · 🚀 Benchmarks · 📚 Documentation · ⚡ Recipes · ❓ FAQ 🐛 Report Bug · 💡 Request Feature 🧭 Table of Contents Introduction Quick Start Features Performance Usage Design Caveats License ✨ Introduction Quill is an asynchronous logging and metrics library for C++17 and later . It keeps formatting and I/O away from latency sensitive application threads by encoding log arguments on the frontend and processing them on a dedicated backend worker. Low Frontend Latency : Log arguments are encoded and queued for asynchronous…
read the full quill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or quill more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and quill has 3,077. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and quill free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and quill under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and quill?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and quill in C++. 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 quill?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose quill if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.