head to head · open source
monolog vs lazyjournal
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lazyjournal has 1,406 stars, 34 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. monolog leads on adoption by 1,422% (21,405 vs 1,406 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; lazyjournal is written in Go under MIT. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, lazyjournal 2%. monolog 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
| monolog | lazyjournal | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-08-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 34 |
| 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 lazyjournal if
- You want the lazyjournal feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and lazyjournal 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 lazyjournal
lazyjournal is a terminal user interface, written in Go, for reading and filtering logs from journald, auditd, the file system, Docker and Podman containers, Compose stacks and Kubernetes pods, and it is aimed at system administrators, SREs and developers who need to inspect logs from many different sources without leaving the terminal.
read the full lazyjournal overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or lazyjournal more popular?
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars and lazyjournal has 1,406. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and lazyjournal free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and lazyjournal under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and lazyjournal?
monolog is written in PHP and lazyjournal 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, monolog or lazyjournal?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,405 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lazyjournal if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.