head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs cilium
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,759 stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 13% (29,111 vs 25,759 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%. cilium 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 | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| 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
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 cilium
.. raw:: html Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF based dataplane. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode. It is L7 protocol aware and can enforce network policies on L3 L7 using an identity based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between pods and to external services, and is able to fully replace kube proxy, using efficient hash tables in eBPF, allowing for almost unlimited scale. It also supports advanced…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or cilium more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,759. 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 (29,111 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.