head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs quill
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. quill has 3,079 stars, 275 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 846% (29,120 vs 3,079 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; quill is written in C++ under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, quill 9%. 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 | quill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 275 |
| 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 quill if
- You want the quill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and quill 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 quill
Quill Ultra Low Latency Asynchronous C++17 Logging and Metrics Library 🔬 Try It Online · 🚀 Benchmarks · 📚 Documentation · ⚡ Recipes · ❓ FAQ 🐛 Report Bug · 💡 Request Feature 🧭 Table of Contents Introduction Quick Start Features Performance Usage Design Caveats License ✨ Introduction Quill is an asynchronous logging and metrics library for C++17 and later . It keeps formatting and I/O away from latency sensitive application threads by encoding log arguments on the frontend and processing them on a dedicated backend worker. Low Frontend Latency : Log arguments are encoded and queued for asynchronous…
read the full quill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or quill more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and quill has 3,079. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and quill free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and quill under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and quill?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and quill 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 quill?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose quill if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.