head to head · open source
Elasticsearch vs Grafana Loki
Elasticsearch has 78,462 GitHub stars, 26,239 forks, 6,059 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki has 29,111 stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Elasticsearch leads on adoption by 170% (78,462 vs 29,111 stars). Elasticsearch is written in Java under a custom or non-standard licence; Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Elasticsearch has attracted 33% as many forks as stars, Grafana Loki 14%. 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
| Elasticsearch | Grafana Loki | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 29K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 26K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Elasticsearch if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Grafana Loki if
- You want the Grafana Loki feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Grafana Loki fits your workflow better
About Elasticsearch
= Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine, scalable data store and vector database optimized for speed and relevance on production scale workloads. Elasticsearch is the foundation of Elastic's open Stack platform. Search in near real time over massive datasets, perform vector searches, integrate with generative AI applications, and much more. Use cases enabled by Elasticsearch include: Augmented Generation (RAG)] search] Full text search Logs Metrics Application performance monitoring (APM) Security logs \... and more! To learn more about Elasticsearch's features and…
read the full Elasticsearch overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Elasticsearch or Grafana Loki more popular?
Elasticsearch has 78,462 GitHub stars and Grafana Loki has 29,111. Elasticsearch has the larger community by that measure.
Are Elasticsearch and Grafana Loki free?
Both are open source. Elasticsearch has no licence declared in this registry, and Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Elasticsearch and Grafana Loki?
Elasticsearch is written in Java and Grafana Loki 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, Elasticsearch or Grafana Loki?
Choose Elasticsearch if you want the larger community (78,462 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Grafana Loki if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.