head to head · open source
SigNoz vs m3
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars, 2,497 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. m3 has 4,898 stars, 463 forks, 222 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SigNoz leads on adoption by 556% (32,146 vs 4,898 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; m3 is written in Go under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, m3 9%. SigNoz 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
| SigNoz | m3 | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 463 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick SigNoz if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other 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 SigNoz
SigNoz is an open source, OpenTelemetry native observability platform for cloud native applications. It unifies logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards into a single tool, replacing fragmented monitoring stacks with a correlated signal pipeline. It lives in the observability ecosystem alongside tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Grafana, and is positioned as an open alternative to Datadog.
read the full SigNoz 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 SigNoz or m3 more popular?
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars and m3 has 4,898. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and m3 free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and m3 is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and m3?
SigNoz 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, SigNoz or m3?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,146 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose m3 if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.