head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs opentelemetry-dotnet
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars, 4,174 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opentelemetry-dotnet has 3,767 stars, 913 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 673% (29,124 vs 3,767 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; opentelemetry-dotnet is written in C# under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-dotnet 24%. 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 | opentelemetry-dotnet | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 3.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 913 |
| 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 opentelemetry-dotnet if
- You want the opentelemetry-dotnet feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and opentelemetry-dotnet 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 opentelemetry-dotnet
OpenTelemetry .NET The .NET OpenTelemetry implementation. Table of Contents Supported .NET versions Project status Getting started Getting started with Logging Getting started with Metrics Getting started with Tracing Repository structure Troubleshooting Extensibility Releases Contributing References Supported .NET versions Packages shipped from this repository generally support all the officially supported versions of .NET and .NET Framework (an older Windows based .NET implementation), except .NET Framework 3.5 . Any exceptions to this are noted in the individual README.md files. Project status Stable across…
read the full opentelemetry-dotnet overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or opentelemetry-dotnet more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-dotnet has 3,767. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-dotnet free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and opentelemetry-dotnet under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-dotnet?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and opentelemetry-dotnet 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 opentelemetry-dotnet?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,124 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-dotnet if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.