head to head · open source
Grafana vs telescope
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars, 14,752 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped today. telescope has 5,230 stars, 673 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,368% (76,792 vs 5,230 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; telescope is written in PHP under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, telescope 13%. 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | telescope | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 5.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 673 |
| 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 telescope if
- You want the telescope feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and telescope 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 telescope
Laravel Telescope is an open source debug assistant for the Laravel framework that surfaces the requests, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks and variable dumps passing through an application, and it is built for Laravel developers who need that visibility while working on an application.
read the full telescope overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or telescope more popular?
Grafana has 76,792 GitHub stars and telescope has 5,230. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and telescope free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and telescope under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and telescope?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and telescope in PHP. 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 telescope?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,792 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose telescope if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.