head to head · open source
Grafana vs Uptrace
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Uptrace has 4,286 stars, 215 forks, 52 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,692% (76,791 vs 4,286 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Uptrace is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Uptrace 5%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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.
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Side by side
| Grafana | Uptrace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 4.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 215 |
| 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 Uptrace if
- You want the Uptrace feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Uptrace 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 Uptrace
Uptrace is open source APM platform for modern applications. It sits in Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability ecosystem. It supports OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, logs. It gives one interface for application monitoring, distributed tracing, performance monitoring, and log inspection. README says it comes with query builder, rich dashboards, alerting rules, notifications, and integrations for most languages and frameworks. It is written in Go and licensed AGPL 3.0.
read the full Uptrace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Uptrace more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and Uptrace has 4,286. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and Uptrace free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Uptrace under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and Uptrace?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and Uptrace 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 Uptrace?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Uptrace if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.