head to head · open source
monolog vs pyroscope
monolog has 21,406 GitHub stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. pyroscope has 11,661 stars, 802 forks, 400 open issues and last shipped yesterday. monolog leads on adoption by 84% (21,406 vs 11,661 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; pyroscope is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, pyroscope 7%. pyroscope was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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 | pyroscope | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-09 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 802 |
| 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 pyroscope if
- You want the pyroscope feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pyroscope 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 pyroscope
Grafana Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform for developers, SREs, and platform teams who need to find CPU, memory, and I/O bottlenecks in running applications and trace them down to a single line of code.
read the full pyroscope overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or pyroscope more popular?
monolog has 21,406 GitHub stars and pyroscope has 11,661. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and pyroscope free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and pyroscope under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and pyroscope?
monolog is written in PHP and pyroscope 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 pyroscope?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,406 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pyroscope if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.