head to head · open source
Sentry vs Grafana Loki
Sentry has 45,697 GitHub stars, 4,959 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki has 29,111 stars, 4,169 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Sentry leads on adoption by 57% (45,697 vs 29,111 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 29K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 46K 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
Users and logs provide clues. Sentry provides answers. What's Sentry? Sentry is the debugging platform that helps every developer detect, trace, and fix issues. Code breaks, fix it faster. Official Sentry SDKs JavaScript Electron React Native Python Ruby PHP Laravel Go Rust Java/Kotlin Objective C/Swift C\ /F\ C/C++ Dart/Flutter Perl Clojure Elixir Unity Unreal Engine Godot Engine PowerShell Resources Documentation Discussions (Bugs, feature requests, general questions) Discord Contributing Bug Tracker Code Transifex (Translate Sentry\!)
read the full Sentry overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or Grafana Loki more popular?
Sentry has 45,697 GitHub stars and Grafana Loki has 29,111. 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 (45,697 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.