head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs plog
Grafana Loki has 29,123 GitHub stars, 4,174 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped today. plog has 2,597 stars, 407 forks, 58 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,021% (29,123 vs 2,597 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; plog is written in C++ under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, plog 16%. 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 | plog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-10-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 407 |
| 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 plog if
- You want the plog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and plog 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 plog
Plog portable, simple and extensible C++ logging library Pretty powerful logging library in about 1000 lines of code Introduction Hello log! Features Integration Copy the source Git submodule CMake integration add subdirectory FetchContent Package managers Usage Step 1: Adding includes Step 2: Initialization RollingFileInitializer ConsoleInitializer Manual initialization (Init.h) Step 3: Logging Basic logging macros Conditional logging macros Logger severity checker Advanced usage Changing severity at runtime Custom initialization Multiple appenders Multiple loggers Share log instances across modules (exe, dll…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or plog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,123 GitHub stars and plog has 2,597. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and plog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and plog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and plog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and plog 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 plog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,123 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose plog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.