head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs clockwork
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. clockwork has 5,946 stars, 332 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 390% (29,120 vs 5,946 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 | ★ 5.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-08-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 332 |
| 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
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 clockwork
Clockwork is a development tool for PHP available right in your browser. Clockwork gives you an insight into your application runtime including request data, performance metrics, log entries, database queries, cache queries, redis commands, dispatched events, queued jobs, rendered views and more for HTTP requests, commands, queue jobs and tests. This repository contains the server side component of Clockwork. Check out on the Clockwork website for details. Installation Install the Clockwork library via Composer. Congratulations, you are done! To enable more features like commands or queue jobs profiling, publish…
read the full clockwork overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or clockwork more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and clockwork has 5,946. 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 (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose clockwork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.