head to head · open source
Grafana vs swift-metrics
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. swift-metrics has 798 stars, 83 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 9,629% (77,638 vs 798 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; swift-metrics is written in Swift under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, swift-metrics 10%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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 | swift-metrics | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 798 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 83 |
| 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 swift-metrics if
- You want the swift-metrics feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and swift-metrics 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 swift-metrics
SwiftMetrics A Metrics API package for Swift. Almost all production server software needs to emit metrics information for observability. Because it's unlikely that all parties can agree on one specific metrics backend implementation, this API is designed to establish a standard that can be implemented by various metrics libraries which then post the metrics data to backends like Prometheus, Graphite, publish over statsd, write to disk, etc. This is the beginning of a community driven open source project actively seeking contributions, be it code, documentation, or ideas. Apart from contributing to SwiftMetrics…
read the full swift-metrics overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or swift-metrics more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and swift-metrics has 798. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and swift-metrics free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and swift-metrics under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and swift-metrics?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and swift-metrics in Swift. 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 swift-metrics?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose swift-metrics if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.