head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs NLog
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NLog has 6,545 stars, 1,377 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 342% (28,917 vs 6,545 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 | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 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
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 NLog
NLog is a free logging platform for .NET, distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license and maintained in the NLog/NLog repository on GitHub. It provides rich log routing and management capabilities, so an application can produce and manage high quality logs regardless of its size or complexity. It lives in the .NET ecosystem, is written in C , and targets cross platform use across .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, MAUI, and Mono. The project has been developed for fourteen years and is published as the NLog package on NuGet, with the current 6.0 line adding AOT support.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or NLog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and NLog has 6,545. 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 (28,917 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.