head to head · open source
Sentry vs Grafana Loki
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars, 4,854 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki has 28,909 stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Sentry leads on adoption by 55% (44,792 vs 28,909 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, Grafana Loki 14%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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
| Sentry | Grafana Loki | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 29K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 45K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Grafana Loki if
- You want the Grafana Loki feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Grafana Loki fits your workflow better
About Sentry
Sentry is an open source debugging platform for detecting, tracing, and fixing software issues in real time. It lives in the developer infrastructure ecosystem and provides error tracking and performance monitoring across languages, frameworks, and runtime environments.
read the full Sentry overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or Grafana Loki more popular?
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars and Grafana Loki has 28,909. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and Grafana Loki free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and Grafana Loki?
Sentry is written in Python and Grafana Loki in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Sentry or Grafana Loki?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,792 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Grafana Loki if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.