head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs cilium
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 15% (28,909 vs 25,232 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. 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 | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 25K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 cilium if
- You want the cilium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cilium 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 cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or cilium more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and cilium free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cilium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and cilium?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and cilium 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 cilium?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,909 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.