head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs rsyslog
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rsyslog has 2,336 stars, 736 forks, 207 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,138% (28,917 vs 2,336 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; rsyslog is written in C under LGPL-3.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, rsyslog 32%. 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 | rsyslog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 736 |
| 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 rsyslog if
- You want the rsyslog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and rsyslog 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 rsyslog
Rsyslog is a high performance log ingestion and ETL engine written in C and released under the LGPL 3.0, built for operators and engineers who must take in, transform, and route very large volumes of log data from many sources to many destinations.
read the full rsyslog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or rsyslog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and rsyslog has 2,336. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and rsyslog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and rsyslog under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and rsyslog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and rsyslog 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 rsyslog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose rsyslog if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.