head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs effect
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. effect has 17,464 stars, 892 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 67% (29,111 vs 17,464 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; effect is written in TypeScript under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, effect 5%. Grafana Loki 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 | effect | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 892 |
| 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 effect if
- You want the effect feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and effect 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 effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or effect more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars and effect has 17,464. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and effect free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and effect under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and effect?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and effect in TypeScript. 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 effect?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,111 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose effect if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.