head to head · open source
NetData vs fsmon
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars, 6,630 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped today. fsmon has 1,028 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. NetData leads on adoption by 7,737% (80,564 vs 1,028 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 | 2026-09-18 | 2026-04-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 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
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 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 filte…
read the full fsmon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or fsmon more popular?
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,028. 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 (80,564 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.