head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs slog
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. slog has 1,706 stars, 98 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,607% (29,120 vs 1,706 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; slog is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, slog 6%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Grafana Loki | slog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-06-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 98 |
| 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 slog if
- You want the slog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and slog 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 slog
Getting started Introduction FAQ Crate list slog rs The Logging for [Rust][rust] You might consider using tracing instead It's been a while since slog was created and it served Rust community well all this time. It remains a stable, featureful and battle tested library, used in many important projects. In last few years, another ecosystem for Rust was created with similar features and a very good support for debugging async code and already larger dev team and community. Please check tracing and see if it is more suitable for your use case. It seems that it is already a go to logging/tracing solution for Rust…
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or slog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and slog has 1,706. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and slog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and slog under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and slog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and slog in Rust. 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 slog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose slog if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.