head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs zipkin
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,461 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 66% (28,909 vs 17,461 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. 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 | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 zipkin if
- You want the zipkin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and zipkin 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 zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system maintained under the OpenZipkin organization and written in Java, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java and JVM ecosystem as a standalone server, while its instrumentation libraries span many languages. The project gathers the timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures, and it covers both the collection and the lookup of that data.
read the full zipkin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or zipkin more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,909 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,461. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and zipkin free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and zipkin?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and zipkin in Java. 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 zipkin?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,909 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.