head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs tracing
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tracing has 6,954 stars, 960 forks, 887 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 319% (29,120 vs 6,954 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; tracing is written in Rust under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, tracing 14%. 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 | tracing | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 7.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 960 |
| 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 tracing if
- You want the tracing feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and tracing 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 tracing
![Tracing — Structured, application level diagnostics][splash] [splash]: [![Crates.io][crates badge]][crates url] [![Documentation][docs badge]][docs url] [![Documentation (v0.2.x)][docs v0.2.x badge]][docs v0.2.x url] [![MIT licensed][mit badge]][mit url] [![Build Status][actions badge]][actions url] [![Discord chat][discord badge]][discord url] [crates badge]: [crates url]: [docs badge]: [docs url]: [docs v0.2.x badge]: [docs v0.2.x url]: [mit badge]: [mit url]: LICENSE [actions badge]: [actions url]: [discord badge]: [discord url]: Website Chat Overview tracing is a framework for instrumenting Rust programs…
read the full tracing overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or tracing more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and tracing has 6,954. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and tracing free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and tracing under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and tracing?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and tracing 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 tracing?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tracing if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.