head to head · open source
Grafana vs skydive
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. skydive has 2,808 stars, 416 forks, 119 open issues and last shipped 1.1 years ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,665% (77,638 vs 2,808 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; skydive is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, skydive 15%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | skydive | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 416 |
| 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 skydive if
- You want the skydive feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and skydive 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 skydive
Skydive Skydive is an open source real time network topology and protocols analyzer. It aims to provide a comprehensive way of understanding what is happening in the network infrastructure. Skydive agents collect topology information and flows and forward them to a central agent for further analysis. All the information is stored in an Elasticsearch database. Skydive is SDN agnostic but provides SDN drivers in order to enhance the topology and flows information. Key features Captures network topology and flows Full history of network topology and flows Distributed Ability to follow a flow along a path in the…
read the full skydive overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or skydive more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and skydive has 2,808. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and skydive free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and skydive under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and skydive?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and skydive 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 skydive?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose skydive if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.