head to head · open source
beszel vs monolog
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. monolog has 21,406 stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. beszel leads on adoption by 19% (25,459 vs 21,406 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; monolog is written in PHP under MIT. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, monolog 9%. beszel 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
| beszel | monolog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 21K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick monolog if
- You want the monolog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and monolog fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About monolog
Monolog is a logging library for PHP that sends log records to files, sockets, inboxes, databases, and various web services. It ships with the handlers, formatters, and processors needed to route records where they belong, and special handlers allow more advanced logging strategies than a single output stream. The library lives in the PHP ecosystem and is distributed through Packagist as monolog/monolog . It is released under the MIT license and has been developed for sixteen years, with more than twenty one thousand stars and roughly nineteen hundred forks on GitHub.
read the full monolog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or monolog more popular?
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars and monolog has 21,406. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and monolog free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and monolog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and monolog?
beszel is written in Go and monolog in PHP. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, beszel or monolog?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,459 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose monolog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.