head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs lazyjournal
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped today. lazyjournal has 1,437 stars, 35 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,926% (29,120 vs 1,437 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; lazyjournal is written in Go under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, lazyjournal 2%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | lazyjournal | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 35 |
| 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 lazyjournal if
- You want the lazyjournal feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and lazyjournal 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 lazyjournal
Terminal user interface for viewing logs from journald , auditd , file system, Docker and Podman containers, Compose stacks and Kubernetes pods with support for log highlighting and several filtering modes. Written in Go with the awesome gocui (fork gocui) library. This tool is inspired by and made with love for LazyDocker and LazyGit. It is also included in Awesome Go, Awesome TUIs and Awesome Docker, check out other useful projects on the repository pages. [!NOTE] You can try it out on the Killercoda playground. Features Simple installation, to run download one executable file without dependencies and…
read the full lazyjournal overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or lazyjournal more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and lazyjournal has 1,437. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and lazyjournal free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and lazyjournal under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and lazyjournal?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and lazyjournal 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 lazyjournal?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose lazyjournal if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.