head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs swift-log
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars, 4,174 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. swift-log has 4,058 stars, 351 forks, 26 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 618% (29,124 vs 4,058 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; swift-log is written in Swift under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, swift-log 9%. 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 | swift-log | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 4.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 351 |
| 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 swift-log if
- You want the swift-log feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and swift-log 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 swift-log
SwiftLog This repository contains a logging API implementation for Swift. SwiftLog provides a unified, performant, and ergonomic logging API that can be adopted by libraries and applications across the Swift ecosystem. 📚 Documentation and tutorials are available on the Swift Package Index 🚀 Contributions are welcome, please see CONTRIBUTING.md 🪪 License is Apache 2.0, repeated in LICENSE.txt 🔒 Security issues should be reported via the process in Security 🔀 Available Logging Backends : SwiftLog is an API package you'll want to choose from the many community maintained logging backends for production use…
read the full swift-log overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or swift-log more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,124 GitHub stars and swift-log has 4,058. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and swift-log free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and swift-log under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and swift-log?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and swift-log in Swift. 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 swift-log?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,124 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose swift-log if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.