head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs debug
Grafana Loki has 29,123 GitHub stars, 4,174 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped today. debug has 11,458 stars, 996 forks, 96 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 154% (29,123 vs 11,458 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; debug is written in JavaScript under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, debug 9%. 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 | debug | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 11K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-10-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 996 |
| 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 debug if
- You want the debug feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and debug 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 debug
debug A tiny JavaScript debugging utility modelled after Node.js core's debugging technique. Works in Node.js and web browsers. Installation Usage debug exposes a function; simply pass this function the name of your module, and it will return a decorated version of console.error for you to pass debug statements to. This will allow you to toggle the debug output for different parts of your module as well as the module as a whole. Example app.js : Example worker.js : The DEBUG environment variable is then used to enable these based on space or comma delimited names. Here are some examples: Windows command prompt…
read the full debug overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or debug more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,123 GitHub stars and debug has 11,458. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and debug free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and debug under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and debug?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and debug in JavaScript. 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 debug?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,123 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose debug if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.