head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs metrics
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. metrics has 17,202 stars, 2,275 forks, 68 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 68% (28,909 vs 17,202 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; metrics is written in JavaScript under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, metrics 13%. 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 | metrics | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-05-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| 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 metrics if
- You want the metrics feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and metrics fits your workflow better
About Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system designed as the log oriented counterpart to Prometheus. It operates within the cloud native observability ecosystem, specifically targeting Kubernetes and containerized environments. Loki avoids expensive full text indexing by indexing only metadata labels attached to log streams, storing the raw log content in compressed form. This design choice makes Loki significantly simpler to operate and more cost effective than traditional log systems that index every word.
read the full Grafana Loki overview →
About metrics
Metrics is an infographics generator for GitHub accounts, published under the MIT license and written in JavaScript. It lives in the GitHub ecosystem as a GitHub Action and as a hosted web service, and it produces statistics about a user, an organization, or a repository. The output is rendered as SVG, Markdown, PDF, or JSON, which means the same generated figures can be embedded in a profile readme, attached to a blog post, or consumed by another tool.
read the full metrics overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or metrics more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars and metrics has 17,202. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and metrics free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and metrics under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and metrics?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and metrics in JavaScript. 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 metrics?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,909 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose metrics if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.