head to head · open source
monolog vs litter
monolog has 21,402 GitHub stars, 1,920 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. litter has 1,655 stars, 61 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. monolog leads on adoption by 1,193% (21,402 vs 1,655 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; litter is written in Go under MIT. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, litter 4%. 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 | litter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-01 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 61 |
| 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 litter if
- You want the litter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and litter fits your workflow better
About monolog
Monolog Logging for PHP Note This is the documentation for Monolog 3.x , if you are using older releases see the documentation for Monolog 2.x or Monolog 1.x Monolog sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services. See the complete list of handlers below. Special handlers allow you to build advanced logging strategies. This library implements the PSR 3 interface that you can type hint against in your own libraries to keep a maximum of interoperability. You can also use it in your applications to make sure you can always use another compatible logger at a later time. As of 1.11.0…
read the full monolog overview →
About litter
Litter Litter is a pretty printer library for Go data structures to aid in debugging and testing. Litter is provided by Sanity: The Headless CMS Construction Kit Litter named for the fact that it outputs literals , which you litter your output with. As a side benefit, all Litter output is syntactically correct Go. You can use Litter to emit data during debug, and it's also really nice for "snapshot data" in unit tests, since it produces consistent, sorted output. Litter was inspired by Spew, but focuses on terseness and readability. Basic example This: will output: Use in tests Litter is a great alternative to…
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or litter more popular?
monolog has 21,402 GitHub stars and litter has 1,655. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and litter free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and litter under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and litter?
monolog is written in PHP and litter 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 litter?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,402 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.