head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs hl
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hl has 3,322 stars, 68 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 777% (29,120 vs 3,322 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; hl is written in Rust under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, hl 2%. 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 | hl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 68 |
| 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 hl if
- You want the hl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and hl 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 hl
hl [![Build Status][ci img]][ci] [![Coverage Status][cov img]][cov] [![Release][release img]][release] High performance log viewer and processor that transforms logs in JSON and logfmt formats into a human readable output. Built with efficiency in mind, it enables quick parsing and analysis of large log files with minimal overhead. Features overview Automatic Pager Integration : Automatically integrates with a pager for enhanced convenience, defaulting to less if available, but fully supporting any compatible pager. Log Streaming Mode : Enable log streaming with the P flag, which disables the pager. Field Based…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or hl more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and hl has 3,322. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and hl free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and hl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and hl?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and hl in Rust. 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 hl?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose hl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.