head to head · open source
Grafana vs stern
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stern has 4,862 stars, 178 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,479% (76,791 vs 4,862 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; stern is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, stern 4%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | stern | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 178 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 77K 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 stern if
- You want the stern 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 stern fits your workflow better
About Grafana
Grafana is an open source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces across diverse data sources. It runs in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, designed for teams needing unified visibility into system behavior without vendor lock in. Built with TypeScript and Go, it provides a composable architecture that integrates with existing toolchains.
read the full Grafana overview →
About stern
Stern is a command line tool that tails logs from multiple Kubernetes pods and multiple containers at the same time, colour coding each result, and it is built for developers and operators who debug workloads on Kubernetes instead of reading pods one at a time.
read the full stern overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or stern more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and stern has 4,862. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and stern free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and stern under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and stern?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and stern 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 stern?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose stern if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.