head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs opentelemetry-python
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars, 4,174 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opentelemetry-python has 2,701 stars, 1,060 forks, 425 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 978% (29,124 vs 2,701 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; opentelemetry-python is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-python 39%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana Loki | opentelemetry-python | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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-python if
- You want the opentelemetry-python feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and opentelemetry-python 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-python
OpenTelemetry Python Project Status See the OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for Python. Project versioning information and stability guarantees can be found here. Breaking Changes [!IMPORTANT] We are working on stabilizing the Log signal which would require making deprecations and breaking changes. We will try to reduce the releases that may require an update to your code, especially for instrumentations or for SDK developers. Getting started You can find the getting started guide for OpenTelemetry Python here. If you are looking for examples on how to use the OpenTelemetry API to instrument your code manually, or…
read the full opentelemetry-python overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or opentelemetry-python more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-python has 2,701. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-python free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and opentelemetry-python under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and opentelemetry-python?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and opentelemetry-python in Python. 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-python?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,124 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-python if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.