head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs beszel
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel has 26,783 stars, 1,138 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 9% (29,111 vs 26,783 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 | ★ 27K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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
Loki: like Prometheus, but for logs. Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream. Compared to other log aggregation systems, Loki: does not do full text indexing on logs. By storing compressed, unstructured logs and only indexing metadata, Loki is simpler to operate and cheaper to run. indexes and groups log streams using the same labels you’re already using with Prometheus, enabling you to…
read the full Grafana Loki overview →
About beszel
Beszel Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform that includes Docker statistics, historical data, and alert functions. It has a friendly web interface, simple configuration, and is ready to use out of the box. It supports automatic backup, multi user, OAuth authentication, and API access. Features Lightweight : Smaller and less resource intensive than leading solutions. Simple : Easy setup with little manual configuration required. Docker stats : Tracks CPU, memory, and network usage history for each container. ZFS : Tracks pool capacity, health, and I/O, plus per dataset usage. Alerts : Configurable…
read the full beszel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or beszel more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars and beszel has 26,783. 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 (29,111 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose beszel if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.