head to head · open source
NetData vs beyla
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars, 6,630 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped today. beyla has 2,132 stars, 193 forks, 109 open issues and last shipped today. NetData leads on adoption by 3,679% (80,564 vs 2,132 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; beyla is written in Go under Apache-2.0. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, beyla 9%. beyla 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 | beyla | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 193 |
| 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 beyla if
- You want the beyla 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 beyla 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 beyla
Grafana Beyla Open source zero code automatic instrumentation with eBPF and OpenTelemetry. Important Update for current and future Beyla contributors Beyla has been donated to the CNCF OpenTelemetry Project, under the project name OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation or OBI for short. We are in the process of vendoring most of the code that exists in the Beyla source repository from upstream. If you are working on a PR, unless it's related to documentation, please make the PR to the upstream repository. All Beyla current maintainers work full time on the upstream repository. We expect that the process of migrating …
read the full beyla overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or beyla more popular?
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars and beyla has 2,132. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and beyla free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and beyla under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and beyla?
NetData is written in Go and beyla 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 beyla?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (80,564 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose beyla if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.