head to head · open source
Grafana vs telegraf
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. telegraf has 17,807 stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 331% (76,791 vs 17,807 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; telegraf is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, telegraf 33%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (hacktoberfest, influxdb, 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 | telegraf | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 18K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 5.8K |
| 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 telegraf if
- You want the telegraf feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and telegraf 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 telegraf
Telegraf is a Go based, MIT licensed open source agent that collects, processes, aggregates, and writes metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data, and it is aimed at engineers who run their own monitoring and observability pipelines.
read the full telegraf overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or telegraf more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and telegraf has 17,807. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and telegraf free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and telegraf under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and telegraf?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and telegraf 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 telegraf?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose telegraf if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.