head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs opentelemetry-php
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opentelemetry-php has 912 stars, 232 forks, 97 open issues and last shipped today. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 3,071% (28,917 vs 912 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; opentelemetry-php is written in PHP under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-php 25%. opentelemetry-php 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-php | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 912 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 232 |
| 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-php if
- You want the opentelemetry-php feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and opentelemetry-php 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-php
OpenTelemetry PHP is the official PHP implementation of OpenTelemetry: a monorepo of Composer packages published on Packagist that provide tracing, metrics, and logging APIs, an SDK, context propagation, semantic conventions, and an OTLP exporter for PHP applications, aimed at PHP developers and platform teams who must instrument services and ship telemetry to an observability backend.
read the full opentelemetry-php overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or opentelemetry-php more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-php has 912. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-php free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and opentelemetry-php under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-php?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and opentelemetry-php in PHP. 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-php?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-php if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.