head to head · open source
Grafana vs sensu-go
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sensu-go has 1,114 stars, 181 forks, 274 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 6,869% (77,638 vs 1,114 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; sensu-go is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, sensu-go 16%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (alerting, go, metrics, 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 | sensu-go | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 181 |
| 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 sensu-go if
- You want the sensu-go feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sensu-go 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 sensu-go
Sensu Go CircleCI: Sensu is an open source monitoring tool for ephemeral infrastructure and distributed applications. It is an agent based monitoring system with built in auto discovery, making it very well suited for cloud environments. Sensu uses service checks to monitor service health and collect telemetry data. It also has a number of well defined APIs for configuration, external data input, and to provide access to Sensu's data. Sensu is extremely extensible and is commonly referred to as "the monitoring router". To learn more about Sensu, please visit the website and read the documentation. What is Sensu…
read the full sensu-go overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or sensu-go more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and sensu-go has 1,114. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and sensu-go free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and sensu-go under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and sensu-go?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and sensu-go 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 sensu-go?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose sensu-go if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.