head to head · open source
Grafana vs telemetry
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. telemetry has 923 stars, 76 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 8,311% (77,638 vs 923 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; telemetry is written in Erlang under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, telemetry 8%. 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 | telemetry | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 923 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Erlang |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 76 |
| 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 telemetry if
- You want the telemetry feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Erlang
- You evaluated both and telemetry 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 telemetry
Telemetry Documentation Telemetry is a lightweight library for dynamic dispatching of events, with a focus on metrics and instrumentation. Any Erlang or Elixir library can use telemetry to emit events. Application code and other libraries can then hook into those events and run custom handlers. Note: this library is agnostic to tooling and therefore is not directly related to OpenTelemetry. For OpenTelemetry in the Erlang VM, see opentelemetry erlang, and check opentelemetry telemetry to connect both libraries. Usage In a nutshell, you register a custom module and function to be invoked for certain events, which…
read the full telemetry overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or telemetry more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and telemetry has 923. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and telemetry free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and telemetry under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and telemetry?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and telemetry in Erlang. 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 telemetry?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose telemetry if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.