head to head · open source
telegraf vs node_exporter
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node_exporter has 13,785 stars, 2,710 forks, 314 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. telegraf leads on adoption by 29% (17,807 vs 13,785 stars). telegraf is written in Go under MIT; node_exporter is written in Go under Apache-2.0. telegraf has attracted 33% as many forks as stars, node_exporter 20%. telegraf 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
| telegraf | node_exporter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.8K | ⑂ 2.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick telegraf if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 telegraf
Telegraf is a Go based, MIT licensed open source agent that collects, processes, aggregates, and writes metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data, and it is aimed at engineers who run their own monitoring and observability pipelines.
read the full telegraf 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 telegraf or node_exporter more popular?
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars and node_exporter has 13,785. telegraf has the larger community by that measure.
Are telegraf and node_exporter free?
Both are open source. telegraf is licensed under MIT and node_exporter under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between telegraf and node_exporter?
telegraf is written in Go 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, telegraf or node_exporter?
Choose telegraf if you want the larger community (17,807 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose node_exporter if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.