head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs kubeshark
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kubeshark has 12,127 stars, 558 forks, 149 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 140% (29,120 vs 12,127 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; kubeshark is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, kubeshark 5%. 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 | kubeshark | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 558 |
| 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 kubeshark if
- You want the kubeshark 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 kubeshark fits your workflow better
About Grafana Loki
Loki: like Prometheus, but for logs. Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream. Compared to other log aggregation systems, Loki: does not do full text indexing on logs. By storing compressed, unstructured logs and only indexing metadata, Loki is simpler to operate and cheaper to run. indexes and groups log streams using the same labels you’re already using with Prometheus, enabling you to…
read the full Grafana Loki overview →
About kubeshark
Network Observability for SREs & AI Agents Live Demo · Docs Kubeshark indexes cluster wide network traffic at the kernel level using eBPF — delivering instant answers to any query using network, API, and Kubernetes semantics. What you can do: Download Retrospective PCAPs — cluster wide packet captures filtered by nodes, time, workloads, and IPs. Store PCAPs for long term retention and later investigation. Visualize Network Data — explore traffic matching queries with API, Kubernetes, or network semantics through a real time dashboard. See Encrypted Traffic in Plain Text — automatically decrypt TLS/mTLS traffic…
read the full kubeshark overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or kubeshark more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and kubeshark has 12,127. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and kubeshark free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and kubeshark under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and kubeshark?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and kubeshark 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 kubeshark?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kubeshark if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.