head to head · open source
Grafana vs loglayer
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. loglayer has 550 stars, 11 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 14,016% (77,638 vs 550 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; loglayer is written in TypeScript under MIT. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, loglayer 2%. Grafana 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 | loglayer | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 550 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 11 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick loglayer if
- You want the loglayer feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and loglayer fits your workflow better
About Grafana
The open source platform for monitoring and observability Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture: Visualizations: Fast and flexible client side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs. Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic & reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad hoc queries and dynamic…
read the full Grafana overview →
About loglayer
LogLayer loglayer is a unified logger that routes logs to various logging libraries, cloud providers, files, and OpenTelemetry while providing a fluent API for specifying log messages, metadata and errors. Supports browser, Node.js, Bun, and Deno platforms. For full documentation, read the docs. Also available for Go! See go.loglayer.dev for the Go version. With the Pretty Terminal Transport: The Wide Events Mixin enables comprehensive, self contained log entries that capture an entire operation's context. For background on the problem this solves, see Why Logging Sucks. Development Setup This is a monorepo…
read the full loglayer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or loglayer more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and loglayer has 550. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and loglayer free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and loglayer under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and loglayer?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and loglayer 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 or loglayer?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose loglayer if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.