head to head · open source
OpenObserve vs phantomas
OpenObserve has 22,027 GitHub stars, 1,098 forks, 598 open issues and last shipped today. phantomas has 2,262 stars, 135 forks, 65 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. OpenObserve leads on adoption by 874% (22,027 vs 2,262 stars). OpenObserve is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; phantomas is written in JavaScript under BSD-2-Clause. OpenObserve has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, phantomas 6%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| OpenObserve | phantomas | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 135 |
| 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 phantomas if
- You want the phantomas feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and phantomas 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 phantomas
phantomas is a modular, headless Chromium based web performance metrics collector written in JavaScript, released under the BSD 2 Clause licence, and intended for developers and operations teams who need to measure and monitor real page behaviour from Node.js scripts, test suites, or containers.
read the full phantomas overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenObserve or phantomas more popular?
OpenObserve has 22,027 GitHub stars and phantomas has 2,262. OpenObserve has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenObserve and phantomas free?
Both are open source. OpenObserve is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and phantomas under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenObserve and phantomas?
OpenObserve is written in TypeScript and phantomas in JavaScript. 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 phantomas?
Choose OpenObserve if you want the larger community (22,027 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose phantomas if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.