head to head · open source
Grafana vs snmp_exporter
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. snmp_exporter has 2,193 stars, 749 forks, 103 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 3,440% (77,638 vs 2,193 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; snmp_exporter is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, snmp_exporter 34%. 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 | snmp_exporter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 749 |
| 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 snmp_exporter if
- You want the snmp_exporter 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 snmp_exporter 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 snmp_exporter
Prometheus SNMP Exporter [ ][quay] [ ][hub] This exporter is the recommended way to expose SNMP data in a format which Prometheus can ingest. To simply get started, it's recommended to use the if mib module with switches, access points, or routers using the public v2 auth module, which should be a read only access community on the target device. Note, community strings in SNMP are not considered secrets, as they are sent unencrypted in SNMP v1 and v2c. For secure access, SNMP v3 is required. Concepts While SNMP uses a hierarchical data structure and Prometheus uses an n dimensional matrix, the two systems map…
read the full snmp_exporter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or snmp_exporter more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and snmp_exporter has 2,193. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and snmp_exporter free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and snmp_exporter under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and snmp_exporter?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and snmp_exporter 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 snmp_exporter?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose snmp_exporter if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.