head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs frostmourne
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. frostmourne has 1,494 stars, 317 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,836% (28,917 vs 1,494 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; frostmourne is written in Java under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, frostmourne 21%. 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 | frostmourne | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-04-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 317 |
| 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 frostmourne if
- You want the frostmourne feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and frostmourne 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 frostmourne
Frostmourne（霜之哀伤监控平台）is an MIT licensed, Java based distributed monitoring and alerting system that turns queries against Elasticsearch, Prometheus, SkyWalking, InfluxDB, MySQL/TiDB, ClickHouse, SqlServer and IoTDB data into alarms, and it is built for operations and development teams that already run a log or metrics stack but lack a matching alerting layer.
read the full frostmourne overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or frostmourne more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and frostmourne has 1,494. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and frostmourne free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and frostmourne under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and frostmourne?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and frostmourne in Java. 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 frostmourne?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose frostmourne if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.