head to head · open source
beszel vs hertzbeat
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars, 1,025 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hertzbeat has 7,398 stars, 1,330 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. beszel leads on adoption by 245% (25,541 vs 7,398 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; hertzbeat is written in Java under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, hertzbeat 18%. beszel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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
| beszel | hertzbeat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick hertzbeat if
- You want the hertzbeat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and hertzbeat fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About hertzbeat
Apache HertzBeat is an AI powered, next generation open source real time observability system written in Java under the Apache 2.0 licence, built for teams that need unified metrics and logs collection, centralized alerting distribution, and intelligent management and analysis without deploying an agent on every monitored host.
read the full hertzbeat 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 beszel or hertzbeat more popular?
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars and hertzbeat has 7,398. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and hertzbeat free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and hertzbeat under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and hertzbeat?
beszel is written in Go and hertzbeat in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, beszel or hertzbeat?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,541 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose hertzbeat if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.