head to head · open source
Grafana vs Zabbix
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Zabbix has 6,529 stars, 1,275 forks, 108 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 1,089% (77,638 vs 6,529 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Zabbix is written in Go Template under AGPL-3.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Zabbix 20%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (alerting, 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 | Zabbix | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go Template |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 Zabbix if
- You want the Zabbix feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go Template
- You evaluated both and Zabbix 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 Zabbix
An enterprise class, open source distributed monitoring solution that’s designed to monitor the performance and availability of network devices, servers, services, and other IT resources. Zabbix is a flexible solution that can monitor anything from a simple, standalone application to a large scale environment, with features including: Resource discovery: Discover network entities, server resources, and onboard/offboard devices. Use out of the box integrations (templates) to monitor anything form a low level device to a SAAS service. Metric acquisition: Use an agent or agent less approach for metric acquisition…
read the full Zabbix overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Zabbix more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and Zabbix has 6,529. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and Zabbix free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Zabbix under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and Zabbix?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and Zabbix in Go Template. 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 Zabbix?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Zabbix if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.