Grafana vs Uptime Kuma
Grafana and Uptime Kuma are both monitoring and observability software. Grafana is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 78k GitHub stars. Uptime Kuma is open source under MIT, with 93k 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 Uptime Kuma when
- You want an easy, UptimeRobot-style monitor on your own server for a homelab or small business.
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 self-hosted monitoring tool that checks HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS, Docker and more, sends alerts through 90+ notification services and publishes status pages.
AGPL licensed, and some features live only in Grafana Enterprise or Cloud.
Single-instance design, so it does not monitor from multiple locations or scale to very large numbers of checks.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Self-hosted server
Go, TypeScript and React
JavaScript, Vue, Node.js, SQLite and Socket.IO
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
78k GitHub stars
93k GitHub stars
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v13.3.0.
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release 2.5.9.
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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.