head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs Foundatio
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Foundatio has 2,104 stars, 250 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,284% (29,120 vs 2,104 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Foundatio is written in C# under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, Foundatio 12%. 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 | Foundatio | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 250 |
| 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 Foundatio if
- You want the Foundatio feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and Foundatio 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 Foundatio
Pluggable foundation blocks for building loosely coupled distributed apps. ✨ Why Choose Foundatio? 🔌 Pluggable implementations Swap Redis, Azure, AWS, or in memory with no code changes 🧪 Developer friendly In memory implementations for fast local development and testing 💉 DI native Built for Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection 🎯 Interface first Code against abstractions, not implementations ⚡ Production ready Battle tested in high scale applications 🔄 Consistent APIs Same patterns across caching, queues, storage, and more 🧱 Core Building Blocks 🚀 Quick Start 📦 Provider Implementations 📚 Learn More…
read the full Foundatio overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or Foundatio more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and Foundatio has 2,104. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and Foundatio free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Foundatio under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and Foundatio?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and Foundatio 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 Foundatio?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Foundatio if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.