head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs tracing
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tracing has 6,880 stars, 933 forks, 887 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 320% (28,917 vs 6,880 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 | ★ 6.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-05-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 933 |
| 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
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 tracing
tracing is a Rust framework for instrumenting programs to collect structured, event based diagnostic information, and it is aimed at Rust developers and library authors who need observability beyond plain text log lines.
read the full tracing overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or tracing more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and tracing has 6,880. 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 (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tracing if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.