head to head · open source
telegraf vs pinpoint
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinpoint has 13,872 stars, 3,749 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. telegraf leads on adoption by 28% (17,807 vs 13,872 stars). telegraf is written in Go under MIT; pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0. telegraf has attracted 33% as many forks as stars, pinpoint 27%. telegraf was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), 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 | pinpoint | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.8K | ⑂ 3.7K |
| 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 pinpoint if
- You want the pinpoint feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and pinpoint 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 pinpoint
Pinpoint is an open source Application Performance Management (APM) tool built for large scale distributed systems. It is written primarily in Java and also supports applications written in PHP and Python through a separate agent repository. Inspired by Google's Dapper, it provides a way to analyze the overall structure of a system and how the components inside it are interconnected by tracing transactions across distributed applications. The project lives in the Java ecosystem, is licensed under Apache 2.0, and has been developed for around twelve years, with its current stable release being v3.1.0.…
read the full pinpoint overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is telegraf or pinpoint more popular?
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars and pinpoint has 13,872. telegraf has the larger community by that measure.
Are telegraf and pinpoint free?
Both are open source. telegraf is licensed under MIT and pinpoint under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between telegraf and pinpoint?
telegraf is written in Go and pinpoint in Java. 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 pinpoint?
Choose telegraf if you want the larger community (17,807 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pinpoint if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.