Grafana vs Netdata
Grafana and Netdata are both monitoring and observability software. Grafana is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 78k GitHub stars. Netdata is open source under GPL-3.0, with 81k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Grafana when
- You need shared dashboards and alerts across several data sources, self-hosted or on Grafana Cloud.
- Pick Netdata when
- You want detailed server and container monitoring running within minutes without building Prometheus and Grafana yourself.
Side by side
A dashboard and alerting platform that visualises metrics, logs and traces from Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, SQL databases and many other sources.
A real-time monitoring agent that auto-detects services and collects per-second metrics for servers, containers and applications, with dashboards and alerts.
AGPL licensed, and some features live only in Grafana Enterprise or Cloud.
The agent is open source, but multi-node dashboards and many features go through the paid Netdata Cloud.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service (both)
Go, TypeScript and React
C, Go and Rust
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
78k GitHub stars
81k GitHub stars
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v13.3.0.
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v2.12.2.
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Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.