head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs NLog
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NLog has 6,546 stars, 1,378 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 345% (29,120 vs 6,546 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; NLog is written in C# under BSD-3-Clause. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, NLog 21%. 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 | NLog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 NLog if
- You want the NLog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and NLog 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 NLog
NLog is a free logging platform for .NET with rich log routing and management capabilities. It makes it easy to produce and manage high quality logs for your application regardless of its size or complexity. Handles both structured logging and traditional logging from any .NET language, augment with contextual information, format according to your preference and send them to one or more targets such as file or console. Major and minor releases will be posted on project news. Getting started .NET Framework ASP.NET Core .NET Core Console For the possible options in the config, check the Options list and API…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or NLog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and NLog has 6,546. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and NLog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and NLog under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and NLog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and NLog in C#. 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 NLog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose NLog if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.