head to head · open source
Grafana vs traceway
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traceway has 1,752 stars, 92 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,331% (77,638 vs 1,752 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; traceway is written in Go under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, traceway 5%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (alerting, 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | traceway | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 92 |
| 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 traceway if
- You want the traceway feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and traceway 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 traceway
Built on OpenTelemetry OpenTelemetry native observability. Open source. Self hosted in 90 seconds. Website · Docs · Cloud · Discord Traceway is an OpenTelemetry native observability platform. It combines logs, traces, metrics, session replay/RUM, exceptions, AI tracing, and on call paging in one place. Point an OTLP exporter at it and you're in business. No Collector, no glue code, no per language vendor SDK. MIT licensed. No BSL. No "open core." Every feature is in the box. Self host it for free, or run it on Traceway Cloud if you'd rather not babysit infra. 👋 Join the Traceway Community on Discord → Chat with…
read the full traceway 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 traceway more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and traceway has 1,752. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and traceway free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and traceway under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and traceway?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and traceway 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 traceway?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose traceway if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.