head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs stern
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stern has 4,912 stars, 180 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 493% (29,120 vs 4,912 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; stern is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, stern 4%. 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 | stern | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 180 |
| 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 stern if
- You want the stern feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and stern 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 stern
stern Fork of discontinued wercker/stern Stern allows you to tail multiple pods on Kubernetes and multiple containers within the pod. Each result is color coded for quicker debugging. The query is a regular expression or a Kubernetes resource in the form / so the pod name can easily be filtered and you don't need to specify the exact id (for instance omitting the deployment id). If a pod is deleted it gets removed from tail and if a new pod is added it automatically gets tailed. When a pod contains multiple containers Stern can tail all of them too without having to do this manually for each one. Simply specify…
read the full stern overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or stern more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and stern has 4,912. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and stern free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and stern under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and stern?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and stern 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, Grafana Loki or stern?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose stern if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.