head to head · open source
Grafana vs tracing
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tracing has 6,950 stars, 959 forks, 887 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,017% (77,638 vs 6,950 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; tracing is written in Rust under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, tracing 14%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | tracing | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 7.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 959 |
| 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 tracing if
- You want the tracing feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and tracing 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 tracing
![Tracing — Structured, application level diagnostics][splash] [splash]: [![Crates.io][crates badge]][crates url] [![Documentation][docs badge]][docs url] [![Documentation (v0.2.x)][docs v0.2.x badge]][docs v0.2.x url] [![MIT licensed][mit badge]][mit url] [![Build Status][actions badge]][actions url] [![Discord chat][discord badge]][discord url] [crates badge]: [crates url]: [docs badge]: [docs url]: [docs v0.2.x badge]: [docs v0.2.x url]: [mit badge]: [mit url]: LICENSE [actions badge]: [actions url]: [discord badge]: [discord url]: Website Chat Overview tracing is a framework for instrumenting Rust programs…
read the full tracing overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or tracing more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and tracing has 6,950. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and tracing free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and tracing under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and tracing?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and tracing in Rust. 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 tracing?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tracing if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.