head to head · open source
monolog vs lnav
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lnav has 10,683 stars, 404 forks, 295 open issues and last shipped yesterday. monolog leads on adoption by 100% (21,405 vs 10,683 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; lnav is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, lnav 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 | lnav | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | PHP | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 404 |
| 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 lnav if
- You want the lnav feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and lnav 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 lnav
lnav is a log file viewer for the terminal that decompresses, detects the format of, merges, indexes and queries log files in one interactive text interface, built for developers, system administrators and support engineers who diagnose systems from the command line.
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or lnav more popular?
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars and lnav has 10,683. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and lnav free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and lnav under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and lnav?
monolog is written in PHP and lnav 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 lnav?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,405 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lnav if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.