head to head · open source
Grafana vs RedELK
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. RedELK has 2,686 stars, 388 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,790% (77,638 vs 2,686 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; RedELK is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, RedELK 14%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (elasticsearch, 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | RedELK | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 388 |
| 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 RedELK if
- You want the RedELK 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 RedELK 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 RedELK
RedELK The Red Team's SIEM a tool for Red Teams for tracking and alarming about Blue Team activities as well as enhanced usability in long term operations. 1. Enhanced usability and overview for the red team operators by creating a central location where all relevant operational logs from multiple teamservers are collected and enriched. This is great for historic searching within the operation as well as giving a read only view on the operation (e.g. for the White Team). Especially useful for multi scenario, multi teamserver, multi member and multi month operations. Also, super easy ways for viewing all…
read the full RedELK overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or RedELK more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and RedELK has 2,686. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and RedELK free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and RedELK under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and RedELK?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and RedELK 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 RedELK?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose RedELK if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.