head to head · open source
NetData vs alertmanager
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars, 6,630 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped today. alertmanager has 8,613 stars, 2,469 forks, 419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NetData leads on adoption by 835% (80,564 vs 8,613 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; alertmanager is written in Go under Apache-2.0. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, alertmanager 29%. NetData was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| NetData | alertmanager | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 8.6K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NetData if
- You weight community size — 81K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick alertmanager if
- You want the alertmanager feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and alertmanager fits your workflow better
About NetData
Netdata is an open source, real time infrastructure monitoring platform written in Go and released under GPL 3.0, built for operators and lean teams who need per second visibility across Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Windows systems.
read the full NetData overview →
About alertmanager
Prometheus Alertmanager is the Go based, Apache 2.0 alert routing service that receives alerts from client applications such as the Prometheus server, deduplicates and groups them, and routes them to receivers including email, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Slack and a generic webhook — it is for operations and platform teams that already run Prometheus and need notifications that are neither duplicated nor noisy.
read the full alertmanager overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or alertmanager more popular?
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars and alertmanager has 8,613. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and alertmanager free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and alertmanager under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and alertmanager?
NetData is written in Go and alertmanager 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, NetData or alertmanager?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (80,564 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose alertmanager if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.