head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs clockwork
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. clockwork has 5,954 stars, 333 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 386% (28,917 vs 5,954 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; clockwork is written in PHP under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, clockwork 6%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (logging), 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 | clockwork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-08-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 333 |
| 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 clockwork if
- You want the clockwork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and clockwork 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 clockwork
Clockwork is a development tool for PHP that gives developers an insight into their application runtime — including request data, performance metrics, log entries, database queries, cache queries, redis commands, dispatched events, queued jobs and rendered views — right in the browser, and this repository contains its server side component.
read the full clockwork overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or clockwork more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and clockwork has 5,954. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and clockwork free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and clockwork under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and clockwork?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and clockwork in PHP. 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 clockwork?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose clockwork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.