head to head · open source
monolog vs FASTER
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. FASTER has 6,636 stars, 595 forks, 36 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. monolog leads on adoption by 223% (21,405 vs 6,636 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; FASTER is written in C# under MIT. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, FASTER 9%. monolog was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (logging), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| monolog | FASTER | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 6.6K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 595 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick monolog if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick FASTER if
- You want the FASTER feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and FASTER fits your workflow better
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 →
About FASTER
FASTER is an open source project from Microsoft that provides a fast persistent recoverable log and key value store plus cache, implemented in C and C++. It lives in the .NET ecosystem, with a parallel C++ implementation of the key value component, and is distributed primarily through the NuGet package Microsoft.FASTER.Core. The repository carries the MIT license and the project has been in development for roughly eight years, with topics covering concurrent and multi threaded operation, hash tables, indexing, key value storage, logging, persistence, and recoverability.
read the full FASTER overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or FASTER more popular?
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars and FASTER has 6,636. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and FASTER free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and FASTER under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and FASTER?
monolog is written in PHP and FASTER in C#. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, monolog or FASTER?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,405 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose FASTER if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.