head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs eliot
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. eliot has 1,189 stars, 75 forks, 120 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 2,349% (29,120 vs 1,189 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; eliot is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, eliot 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 | eliot | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-05-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 75 |
| 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 eliot if
- You want the eliot feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and eliot 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 eliot
Eliot: Logging that tells you why it happened ================================================ Python's built in logging and other similar systems output a stream of factoids: they're interesting, but you can't really tell what's going on. Why is your application slow? What caused this code path to be chosen? Why did this error happen? Standard logging can't answer these questions. But with a better model you could understand what and why things happened in your application. You could pinpoint performance bottlenecks, you could understand what happened when, who called what. That is what Eliot does. eliot is a…
read the full eliot overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or eliot more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and eliot has 1,189. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and eliot free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and eliot under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and eliot?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and eliot in Python. 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 eliot?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose eliot if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.