head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs beszel
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel has 25,459 stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 14% (28,909 vs 25,459 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; beszel is written in Go under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, beszel 4%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Grafana Loki | beszel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 25K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana Loki if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick beszel if
- You want the beszel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and beszel fits your workflow better
About Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system designed as the log oriented counterpart to Prometheus. It operates within the cloud native observability ecosystem, specifically targeting Kubernetes and containerized environments. Loki avoids expensive full text indexing by indexing only metadata labels attached to log streams, storing the raw log content in compressed form. This design choice makes Loki significantly simpler to operate and more cost effective than traditional log systems that index every word.
read the full Grafana Loki overview →
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or beszel more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars and beszel has 25,459. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and beszel free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and beszel under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and beszel?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and beszel 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, Grafana Loki or beszel?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,909 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose beszel if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.