head to head · open source
Grafana vs slog
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. slog has 1,706 stars, 98 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 4,451% (77,638 vs 1,706 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; slog is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, slog 6%. 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 | slog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-06-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 98 |
| 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 slog if
- You want the slog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and slog 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 slog
Getting started Introduction FAQ Crate list slog rs The Logging for [Rust][rust] You might consider using tracing instead It's been a while since slog was created and it served Rust community well all this time. It remains a stable, featureful and battle tested library, used in many important projects. In last few years, another ecosystem for Rust was created with similar features and a very good support for debugging async code and already larger dev team and community. Please check tracing and see if it is more suitable for your use case. It seems that it is already a go to logging/tracing solution for Rust…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or slog more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and slog has 1,706. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and slog free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and slog under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and slog?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and slog 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 or slog?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose slog if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.