head to head · open source
NetData vs litter
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars, 6,630 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped today. litter has 1,655 stars, 60 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. NetData leads on adoption by 4,768% (80,564 vs 1,655 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; litter is written in Go under MIT. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, litter 4%. NetData 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 | litter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 60 |
| 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 litter if
- You want the litter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and litter 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 litter
Litter Litter is a pretty printer library for Go data structures to aid in debugging and testing. Litter is provided by Sanity: The Headless CMS Construction Kit Litter named for the fact that it outputs literals , which you litter your output with. As a side benefit, all Litter output is syntactically correct Go. You can use Litter to emit data during debug, and it's also really nice for "snapshot data" in unit tests, since it produces consistent, sorted output. Litter was inspired by Spew, but focuses on terseness and readability. Basic example This: will output: Use in tests Litter is a great alternative to JS…
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or litter more popular?
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars and litter has 1,655. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and litter free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and litter under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and litter?
NetData is written in Go and litter 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 litter?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (80,564 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.