head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs go-grpc-middleware
Grafana Loki has 29,123 GitHub stars, 4,174 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped today. go-grpc-middleware has 6,760 stars, 746 forks, 83 open issues and last shipped today. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 331% (29,123 vs 6,760 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; go-grpc-middleware is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, go-grpc-middleware 11%. 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 | go-grpc-middleware | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 746 |
| 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 go-grpc-middleware if
- You want the go-grpc-middleware feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and go-grpc-middleware 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 go-grpc-middleware
Go gRPC Middleware This repository holds gRPC Go Middlewares: interceptors, helpers and utilities. Middleware gRPC Go has support for "interceptors", i.e. middleware that is executed either on the gRPC Server before the request is passed onto the user's application logic, or on the gRPC client either around the user call. It is a perfect way to implement common patterns: auth, logging, tracing, metrics, validation, retries, rate limiting and more, which can be a great generic building blocks that make it easy to build multiple microservices easily. Especially for observability signals (logging, tracing, metrics)…
read the full go-grpc-middleware overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or go-grpc-middleware more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,123 GitHub stars and go-grpc-middleware has 6,760. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and go-grpc-middleware free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and go-grpc-middleware under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and go-grpc-middleware?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and go-grpc-middleware in Go. 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 go-grpc-middleware?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,123 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose go-grpc-middleware if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.