head to head · open source
monolog vs Foundatio
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Foundatio has 2,098 stars, 250 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. monolog leads on adoption by 920% (21,405 vs 2,098 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; Foundatio is written in C# under Apache-2.0. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Foundatio 12%. 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 | Foundatio | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | PHP | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 250 |
| 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 Foundatio if
- You want the Foundatio feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and Foundatio 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 Foundatio
Foundatio is an open source C library, published on NuGet under the Apache 2.0 licence, that provides pluggable foundation blocks — caching, queues, distributed locks, messaging, background jobs, file storage, and resilience — for building loosely coupled distributed applications.
read the full Foundatio overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or Foundatio more popular?
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars and Foundatio has 2,098. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and Foundatio free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and Foundatio under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and Foundatio?
monolog is written in PHP and Foundatio 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 Foundatio?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,405 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Foundatio if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.