head to head · open source
Grafana vs sloth
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sloth has 2,566 stars, 232 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,926% (77,638 vs 2,566 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; sloth is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, sloth 9%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (alerting, 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 | sloth | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 232 |
| 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 sloth if
- You want the sloth 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 sloth 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 sloth
Sloth Project status Sloth is actively maintained and in continuous development. We’re currently working on internal improvements to make Sloth even more extensible and adaptable to real world use cases. While Sloth already supports custom SLI plugins, upcoming changes will bring more flexibility to how SLOs are generated, making it easier to adapt Sloth to your custom needs. Stay tuned for updates! Introduction Meet the easiest way to generate [SLOs][google slo] for Prometheus. Sloth generates understandable, uniform and reliable Prometheus SLOs for any kind of service. Using a simple SLO spec that results in…
read the full sloth overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or sloth more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and sloth has 2,566. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and sloth free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and sloth under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and sloth?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and sloth 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 sloth?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose sloth if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.