head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs litter
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. litter has 1,655 stars, 61 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,660% (29,120 vs 1,655 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; litter is written in Go under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, litter 4%. 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 | litter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 61 |
| 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 litter if
- You want the litter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and litter 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 litter
Litter Litter is a pretty printer library for Go data structures to aid in debugging and testing. Litter is provided by Sanity: The Headless CMS Construction Kit Litter named for the fact that it outputs literals , which you litter your output with. As a side benefit, all Litter output is syntactically correct Go. You can use Litter to emit data during debug, and it's also really nice for "snapshot data" in unit tests, since it produces consistent, sorted output. Litter was inspired by Spew, but focuses on terseness and readability. Basic example This: will output: Use in tests Litter is a great alternative to…
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or litter more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and litter has 1,655. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and litter free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and litter under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and litter?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and litter 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 litter?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.