head to head · open source
Grafana vs tracing
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tracing has 6,877 stars, 932 forks, 887 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,017% (76,791 vs 6,877 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | tracing | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 6.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-05-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 932 |
| 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 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
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 tracing
tracing is a Rust framework for instrumenting programs to collect structured, event based diagnostic information, and it is aimed at Rust developers and library authors who need observability beyond plain text log lines.
read the full tracing 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 tracing more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and tracing has 6,877. 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 (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tracing if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.