head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs monolog
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. monolog has 21,404 stars, 1,921 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 36% (29,111 vs 21,404 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; monolog is written in PHP under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, monolog 9%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (hacktoberfest, 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 | monolog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 21K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 monolog if
- You want the monolog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and monolog 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 monolog
Monolog Logging for PHP Note This is the documentation for Monolog 3.x , if you are using older releases see the documentation for Monolog 2.x or Monolog 1.x Monolog sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services. See the complete list of handlers below. Special handlers allow you to build advanced logging strategies. This library implements the PSR 3 interface that you can type hint against in your own libraries to keep a maximum of interoperability. You can also use it in your applications to make sure you can always use another compatible logger at a later time. As of 1.11.0…
read the full monolog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or monolog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,111 GitHub stars and monolog has 21,404. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and monolog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and monolog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and monolog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and monolog in PHP. 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 monolog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,111 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose monolog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.