head to head · open source
SigNoz vs node_exporter
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars, 2,497 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. node_exporter has 13,792 stars, 2,711 forks, 314 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 133% (32,146 vs 13,792 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; node_exporter is written in Go under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, node_exporter 20%. 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 | node_exporter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 14K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 2.7K |
| 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 node_exporter if
- You want the node_exporter 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 node_exporter 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 node_exporter
Node exporter is a Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS metrics exposed by \ NIX kernels. It is written in Go and ships with pluggable metric collectors, so the set of measurements it gathers can be tuned per host rather than fixed at build time. The project lives in the Prometheus ecosystem, is published under the Apache 2.0 license, and has been developed for roughly thirteen years, with the repository showing 13,782 stars and 2,708 forks at the time of writing.
read the full node_exporter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or node_exporter more popular?
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars and node_exporter has 13,792. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and node_exporter free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and node_exporter is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and node_exporter?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript and node_exporter 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 node_exporter?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,146 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose node_exporter if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.