head to head · open source
NetData vs fsmon
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars, 6,717 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fsmon has 1,032 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. NetData leads on adoption by 7,774% (81,255 vs 1,032 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; fsmon is written in C under MIT. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, fsmon 16%. NetData was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (linux), 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
| NetData | fsmon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-04-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 162 |
| 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 fsmon if
- You want the fsmon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and fsmon fits your workflow better
About NetData
X Ray Vision for your infrastructure! Every Metric, Every Second. No BS. Visit our Home Page MENU: WHO WE ARE KEY FEATURES GETTING STARTED HOW IT WORKS FAQ DOCS COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTE LICENSE [!WARNING] People get addicted to Netdata. Once you use it on your systems, there's no going back. WHO WE ARE Netdata is an open source, real time infrastructure monitoring platform. Monitor, detect, and act across your entire infrastructure. Core Advantages: Instant Insights – With Netdata you can access per second metrics and visualizations. Zero Configuration – You can deploy immediately without complex setup. ML Powered –…
read the full NetData overview →
About fsmon
fsmon Low level filesystem monitor utility for Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Author : pancake @ nowsecure License : MIT Designed for System administrators and incident responders Security researchers and forensic analysts Developers debugging I/O heavy applications Reverse engineers interested in observing filesystem access behavior Installation On macOS you can now install it via brew with these commands: Alternatively just run make or pick the builds from the release page. Usage The tool retrieves file system events from a specific directory and shows them in colorful format or in JSON. It is possible to…
read the full fsmon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or fsmon more popular?
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,032. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and fsmon free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and fsmon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and fsmon?
NetData is written in Go and fsmon in C. 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 fsmon?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (81,255 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.