head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs opentelemetry-go
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opentelemetry-go has 6,555 stars, 1,475 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 341% (28,917 vs 6,555 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; opentelemetry-go is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-go 23%. 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-go | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 6.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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-go if
- You want the opentelemetry-go feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and opentelemetry-go 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 opentelemetry-go
OpenTelemetry Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry, the vendor neutral observability framework. It provides a set of APIs that let Go programs directly measure the performance and behavior of their own software, then send the resulting telemetry to observability platforms. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as the module go.opentelemetry.io/otel , published on pkg.go.dev and licensed under Apache 2.0. It is a long running, actively maintained repository, roughly seven years old, with a large contributor base and a steady release cadence.
read the full opentelemetry-go overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or opentelemetry-go more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-go has 6,555. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-go free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and opentelemetry-go under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-go?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and opentelemetry-go 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 opentelemetry-go?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-go if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.