head to head · open source
NetData vs litter
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars, 6,717 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. litter has 1,655 stars, 61 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. NetData leads on adoption by 4,810% (81,255 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 61 |
| 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
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 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…
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or litter more popular?
NetData has 81,255 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 (81,255 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.