head to head · open source
Grafana vs sysstat
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sysstat has 3,384 stars, 492 forks, 75 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 2,194% (77,638 vs 3,384 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; sysstat is written in C under GPL-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, sysstat 15%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | sysstat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 3.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 492 |
| 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 sysstat if
- You want the sysstat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and sysstat 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 sysstat
sysstat System performance tools for the Linux operating system (C) 1999 2026 Sebastien GODARD (sysstat (at) orange (dot) fr) Introduction The sysstat package contains various utilities, common to many commercial Unixes, to monitor system performance and usage activity: iostat reports CPU statistics and input/output statistics for block devices and partitions. mpstat reports individual or combined processor related statistics. pidstat reports statistics for Linux tasks (processes) : I/O, CPU, memory, etc. tapestat reports statistics for tape drives connected to the system. cifsiostat reports CIFS statistics…
read the full sysstat overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or sysstat more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and sysstat has 3,384. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and sysstat free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and sysstat under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and sysstat?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and sysstat in C. 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 sysstat?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose sysstat if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.