head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs tslog
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tslog has 1,740 stars, 73 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 1,562% (28,917 vs 1,740 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; tslog is written in TypeScript under MIT. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, tslog 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 | tslog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 73 |
| 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 tslog if
- You want the tslog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and tslog 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 tslog
tslog is a zero runtime dependency, MIT licensed logging library for TypeScript and JavaScript that runs unchanged across Node.js, browsers, Deno, Bun, workers and React Native, aimed at developers and teams who want colorized terminal output by default and structured, observability ready JSON when a log pipeline demands it.
read the full tslog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or tslog more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and tslog has 1,740. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and tslog free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and tslog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and tslog?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and tslog in TypeScript. 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 tslog?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,917 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tslog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.