head to head · open source
NetData vs Gatus
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars, 6,717 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Gatus has 12,481 stars, 885 forks, 382 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. NetData leads on adoption by 551% (81,255 vs 12,481 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; Gatus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Gatus 7%. NetData was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (alerting, devops, docker), 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 | Gatus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 12K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 885 |
| 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 Gatus if
- You want the Gatus 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 Gatus 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 Gatus
Gatus is a developer oriented health dashboard that gives you the ability to monitor your services using HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and even DNS queries as well as evaluate the result of said queries by using a list of conditions on values like the status code, the response time, the certificate expiration, the body and many others. The icing on top is that each of these health checks can be paired with alerting via Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Discord, Twilio and many more. I personally deploy it in my Kubernetes cluster and let it monitor the status of my core applications: Looking for a managed solution? Check out…
read the full Gatus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or Gatus more popular?
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars and Gatus has 12,481. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and Gatus free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Gatus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and Gatus?
NetData is written in Go and Gatus 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 Gatus?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (81,255 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Gatus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.