head to head · open source
Grafana vs Uptrace
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Uptrace has 4,311 stars, 224 forks, 52 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,701% (77,638 vs 4,311 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana | Uptrace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 4.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 224 |
| 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 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
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 Uptrace
Languages: English 简体中文 Open source APM: OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs Uptrace is an open source APM that supports distributed tracing, metrics, and logs. You can use it to monitor applications and troubleshoot issues. Uptrace comes with an intuitive query builder, rich dashboards, alerting rules, notifications, and integrations for most languages and frameworks. Uptrace can process billions of spans and metrics on a single server and allows you to monitor your applications at 10x lower cost. Uptrace uses OpenTelemetry framework to collect data and ClickHouse database to store it. It also requires…
read the full Uptrace 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 Uptrace more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and Uptrace has 4,311. 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 (77,638 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.