head to head · open source
OpenObserve vs m3
OpenObserve has 22,027 GitHub stars, 1,098 forks, 598 open issues and last shipped today. m3 has 4,898 stars, 463 forks, 222 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenObserve leads on adoption by 350% (22,027 vs 4,898 stars). OpenObserve is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; m3 is written in Go under Apache-2.0. OpenObserve has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, m3 9%. OpenObserve was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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
| OpenObserve | m3 | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 463 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenObserve if
- You weight community size — 22K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick m3 if
- You want the m3 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 m3 fits your workflow better
About OpenObserve
OpenObserve is an open source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, analytics, Real User Monitoring, session replay, pipelines, SLO, and LLM observability. It lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem and is described as an alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch. The project is built in Rust, ships as a single binary, and uses Parquet columnar storage with an S3 native design.
read the full OpenObserve overview →
About m3
M3 is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Go based monorepo that provides a distributed time series database, query engine, metrics aggregator, and Prometheus sidecar for teams that need to store and query large volumes of metrics on their own infrastructure.
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenObserve or m3 more popular?
OpenObserve has 22,027 GitHub stars and m3 has 4,898. OpenObserve has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenObserve and m3 free?
Both are open source. OpenObserve is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and m3 under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenObserve and m3?
OpenObserve is written in TypeScript and m3 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, OpenObserve or m3?
Choose OpenObserve if you want the larger community (22,027 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose m3 if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.