head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs FASTER
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. FASTER has 6,636 stars, 595 forks, 36 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 336% (28,917 vs 6,636 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; FASTER is written in C# under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, FASTER 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 | FASTER | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 6.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 595 |
| 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 FASTER if
- You want the FASTER feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and FASTER fits your workflow better
About Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system designed as the log oriented counterpart to Prometheus. It operates within the cloud native observability ecosystem, specifically targeting Kubernetes and containerized environments. Loki avoids expensive full text indexing by indexing only metadata labels attached to log streams, storing the raw log content in compressed form. This design choice makes Loki significantly simpler to operate and more cost effective than traditional log systems that index every word.
read the full Grafana Loki overview →
About FASTER
FASTER is an open source project from Microsoft that provides a fast persistent recoverable log and key value store plus cache, implemented in C and C++. It lives in the .NET ecosystem, with a parallel C++ implementation of the key value component, and is distributed primarily through the NuGet package Microsoft.FASTER.Core. The repository carries the MIT license and the project has been in development for roughly eight years, with topics covering concurrent and multi threaded operation, hash tables, indexing, key value storage, logging, persistence, and recoverability.
read the full FASTER overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or FASTER more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and FASTER has 6,636. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and FASTER free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and FASTER under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and FASTER?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and FASTER in C#. 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 FASTER?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose FASTER if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.