head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs nerdlog
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nerdlog has 1,588 stars, 41 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,734% (29,120 vs 1,588 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; nerdlog is written in Go under BSD-2-Clause. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, nerdlog 3%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana Loki | nerdlog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 41 |
| 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 nerdlog if
- You want the nerdlog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and nerdlog 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 nerdlog
Nerdlog Nerdlog is a fast, remote first, multi host TUI log viewer with timeline histogram and no central server. Loosely inspired by Graylog/Kibana, but without the bloat. Pretty much no setup needed, either. It's laser focused on being efficient while querying logs from multiple remote machines simultaneously, filtering them by time range and patterns, while also drawing an interactive timeline histogram for quick visual insight. Primary use case: reading system logs (from the files /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog , or straight from journalctl ) from one or more remote hosts. Very efficient even on large…
read the full nerdlog overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or nerdlog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and nerdlog has 1,588. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and nerdlog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and nerdlog under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and nerdlog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and nerdlog 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 nerdlog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose nerdlog if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.