head to head · open source
telegraf vs pyroscope
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pyroscope has 11,661 stars, 802 forks, 400 open issues and last shipped yesterday. telegraf leads on adoption by 53% (17,807 vs 11,661 stars). telegraf is written in Go under MIT; pyroscope is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. telegraf has attracted 33% as many forks as stars, pyroscope 7%. pyroscope was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (golang, hacktoberfest, 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 | pyroscope | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.8K | ⑂ 802 |
| 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 pyroscope if
- You want the pyroscope feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pyroscope 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 pyroscope
Grafana Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform for developers, SREs, and platform teams who need to find CPU, memory, and I/O bottlenecks in running applications and trace them down to a single line of code.
read the full pyroscope overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is telegraf or pyroscope more popular?
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars and pyroscope has 11,661. telegraf has the larger community by that measure.
Are telegraf and pyroscope free?
Both are open source. telegraf is licensed under MIT and pyroscope under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between telegraf and pyroscope?
telegraf is written in Go and pyroscope 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 pyroscope?
Choose telegraf if you want the larger community (17,807 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pyroscope if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.