head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs Apache SkyWalking
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Apache SkyWalking has 24,984 stars, 6,630 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 17% (29,111 vs 24,984 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Apache SkyWalking is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, Apache SkyWalking 27%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (logging, 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 | Apache SkyWalking | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 25K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 6.6K |
| 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 Apache SkyWalking if
- You want the Apache SkyWalking feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and Apache SkyWalking 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 Apache SkyWalking
Apache SkyWalking ========== SkyWalking : an APM (Application Performance Monitoring) system, especially designed for microservices, cloud native and container based architectures. Abstract SkyWalking is an open source APM system that provides monitoring, tracing and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. Distributed Tracing End to end distributed tracing. Service topology analysis, service centric observability and APIs dashboards. Agents for your stack Java, .Net Core, PHP, NodeJS, Golang, LUA, Rust, C++, Client JavaScript and Python agents with active development and…
read the full Apache SkyWalking overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or Apache SkyWalking more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars and Apache SkyWalking has 24,984. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and Apache SkyWalking free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Apache SkyWalking under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and Apache SkyWalking?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and Apache SkyWalking in Java. 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 Apache SkyWalking?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,111 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Apache SkyWalking if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.