head to head · open source
Grafana vs telescope
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. telescope has 5,235 stars, 673 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,383% (77,638 vs 5,235 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.
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Side by side
| Grafana | telescope | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 5.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 673 |
| 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 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
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 telescope
Introduction Laravel Telescope is an elegant debug assistant for the Laravel framework. Telescope provides insight into the requests coming into your application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps and more. Telescope makes a wonderful companion to your local Laravel development environment. Official Documentation Documentation for Telescope can be found on the Laravel website. Contributing Thank you for considering contributing to Telescope! The contribution guide can be found in the Laravel documentation. Code of…
read the full telescope overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or telescope more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and telescope has 5,235. 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 (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose telescope if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.