head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs telegraf
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. telegraf has 17,807 stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 62% (28,909 vs 17,807 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; telegraf is written in Go under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, telegraf 33%. 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 (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
| Grafana Loki | telegraf | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 18K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 5.8K |
| 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 telegraf if
- You want the telegraf feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and telegraf fits your workflow better
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 →
About telegraf
Telegraf is a Go based, MIT licensed open source agent that collects, processes, aggregates, and writes metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data, and it is aimed at engineers who run their own monitoring and observability pipelines.
read the full telegraf overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or telegraf more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars and telegraf has 17,807. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and telegraf free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and telegraf under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and telegraf?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and telegraf 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 telegraf?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,909 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose telegraf if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.