head to head · open source
monolog vs NLog
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NLog has 6,545 stars, 1,377 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped yesterday. monolog leads on adoption by 227% (21,405 vs 6,545 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; NLog is written in C# under BSD-3-Clause. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, NLog 21%. monolog was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (logger, 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 | NLog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | PHP | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 NLog if
- You want the NLog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and NLog 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 NLog
NLog is a free logging platform for .NET, distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license and maintained in the NLog/NLog repository on GitHub. It provides rich log routing and management capabilities, so an application can produce and manage high quality logs regardless of its size or complexity. It lives in the .NET ecosystem, is written in C , and targets cross platform use across .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, MAUI, and Mono. The project has been developed for fourteen years and is published as the NLog package on NuGet, with the current 6.0 line adding AOT support.
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or NLog more popular?
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars and NLog has 6,545. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and NLog free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and NLog under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and NLog?
monolog is written in PHP and NLog 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 NLog?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,405 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose NLog if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.