head to head · open source
NetData vs traceway
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars, 6,630 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traceway has 1,508 stars, 67 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. NetData leads on adoption by 5,242% (80,564 vs 1,508 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; traceway is written in Go under MIT. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, traceway 4%. 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 | traceway | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 67 |
| 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 traceway if
- You want the traceway feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and traceway 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 traceway
Traceway is an OpenTelemetry native, MIT licensed observability platform that combines logs, traces, metrics, session replay, exceptions, AI tracing, and on call paging in one place, and it is built for engineering teams that want production telemetry without per language vendor SDKs, a Collector, or glue code.
read the full traceway overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or traceway more popular?
NetData has 80,564 GitHub stars and traceway has 1,508. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and traceway free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and traceway under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and traceway?
NetData is written in Go and traceway 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 traceway?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (80,564 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose traceway if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.