head to head · open source
NetData vs karma
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars, 6,717 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. karma has 2,693 stars, 206 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. NetData leads on adoption by 2,917% (81,255 vs 2,693 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; karma is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, karma 8%. NetData was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (alerting), 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 | karma | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 206 |
| 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 karma if
- You want the karma feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and karma 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 karma
karma Alert dashboard for Prometheus Alertmanager. Alertmanager =0.22.0 is required. See GitHub Releases for release changelog. Feature overview Alertmanager UI is useful for browsing alerts and managing silences, but it's lacking as a dashboard tool karma aims to fill this gap. Alert aggregation and deduplication Starting with the 0.7.0 release it can aggregate alerts from multiple Alertmanager instances, running either in HA mode or separate. Unique alerts are displayed by filtering duplicates. Each alert is tagged with the names of all Alertmanager instances it was found at and can be filtered based on those…
read the full karma overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or karma more popular?
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars and karma has 2,693. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and karma free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and karma under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and karma?
NetData is written in Go and karma in TypeScript. 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 karma?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (81,255 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose karma if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.