head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs alloy
Grafana Loki has 28,908 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped today. alloy has 3,547 stars, 709 forks, 1,237 open issues and last shipped today. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 715% (28,908 vs 3,547 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; alloy is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, alloy 20%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (grafana, loki, prometheus), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | alloy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 709 |
| 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 alloy if
- You want the alloy 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 alloy 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 alloy
Grafana Alloy is an open source OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with programmable pipelines that collects metrics, logs, traces, and profiles, and it is built for teams that run observability infrastructure and want a single agent in place of several separate collectors and exporters.
read the full alloy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or alloy more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,908 GitHub stars and alloy has 3,547. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and alloy free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and alloy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and alloy?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and alloy 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 alloy?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,908 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose alloy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.