head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs witr
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. witr has 22,374 stars, 781 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 29% (28,909 vs 22,374 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; witr is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, witr 3%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | witr | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 22K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 781 |
| 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 witr if
- You want the witr feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and witr 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 witr
witr is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed Go tool with both a command line interface and an interactive terminal UI that traces any process, port, container, or file back to the exact chain of systems that started it, and it is built for operators, SREs, and developers who need to answer "why is this running?" during debugging and incident response.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or witr more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars and witr has 22,374. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and witr free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and witr under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and witr?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and witr 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 witr?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,909 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose witr if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.