head to head · open source
Grafana vs Grafana Loki
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki has 29,111 stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana leads on adoption by 167% (77,638 vs 29,111 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Grafana Loki 14%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (grafana, hacktoberfest), 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 | Grafana Loki | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 29K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Grafana Loki if
- You want the Grafana Loki feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Grafana Loki fits your workflow better
About Grafana
The open source platform for monitoring and observability Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture: Visualizations: Fast and flexible client side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs. Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic & reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad hoc queries and dynamic…
read the full Grafana overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Grafana Loki more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and Grafana Loki has 29,111. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and Grafana Loki free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Grafana Loki under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and Grafana Loki?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and Grafana Loki 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 or Grafana Loki?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Grafana Loki if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.