head to head · open source
Grafana vs whisper
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. whisper has 1,260 stars, 320 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 6,062% (77,638 vs 1,260 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; whisper is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, whisper 25%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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 | whisper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-12-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 320 |
| 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 whisper if
- You want the whisper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and whisper 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 whisper
Whisper Overview Whisper is one of three components within the Graphite project: 1. Graphite Web, a Django based web application that renders graphs and dashboards 2. The Carbon metric processing daemons 3. The Whisper time series database library Whisper is a fixed size database, similar in design and purpose to RRD (round robin database). It provides fast, reliable storage of numeric data over time. Whisper allows for higher resolution (seconds per point) of recent data to degrade into lower resolutions for long term retention of historical data. Installation, Configuration and Usage Please refer to the…
read the full whisper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or whisper more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and whisper has 1,260. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and whisper free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and whisper under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and whisper?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and whisper in Python. 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 whisper?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose whisper if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.