head to head · open source
SigNoz vs Grafana Loki
SigNoz has 32,116 GitHub stars, 2,493 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki has 28,909 stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SigNoz leads on adoption by 11% (32,116 vs 28,909 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Grafana Loki 14%. SigNoz was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| SigNoz | Grafana Loki | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 29K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick SigNoz if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 SigNoz
SigNoz is an open source, OpenTelemetry native observability platform for cloud native applications. It unifies logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards into a single tool, replacing fragmented monitoring stacks with a correlated signal pipeline. It lives in the observability ecosystem alongside tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Grafana, and is positioned as an open alternative to Datadog.
read the full SigNoz 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 SigNoz or Grafana Loki more popular?
SigNoz has 32,116 GitHub stars and Grafana Loki has 28,909. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and Grafana Loki free?
Both are open source. SigNoz 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 SigNoz and Grafana Loki?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript 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, SigNoz or Grafana Loki?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,116 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.