head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs evlog
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars, 4,174 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. evlog has 1,910 stars, 69 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,425% (29,124 vs 1,910 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; evlog is written in TypeScript under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, evlog 4%. evlog 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 | evlog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 69 |
| 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 evlog if
- You want the evlog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and evlog 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 evlog
evlog Digging through logs is not observability. It's hope. A single request generates 10+ log lines. When production breaks at 3am, you're sifting scattered lines for a needle of signal. Your errors say "Something went wrong", which helps nobody. evlog is different. One wide event per operation. All the context. Errors that explain why and what to do next. Why evlog? The Problem The Solution Output: Built for AI Assisted Development We're in the age of AI agents writing and debugging code. When an agent encounters an error, it needs clear, structured context to understand what happened and how to fix it…
read the full evlog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or evlog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars and evlog has 1,910. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and evlog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and evlog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and evlog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and evlog 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 evlog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,124 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose evlog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.