head to head · open source
monolog vs quill
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. quill has 3,032 stars, 274 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. monolog leads on adoption by 606% (21,405 vs 3,032 stars). monolog is written in PHP under MIT; quill is written in C++ under MIT. monolog has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, quill 9%. 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 | quill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 3.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 274 |
| 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 quill if
- You want the quill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and quill 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 quill
Quill is an ultra low latency asynchronous logging and metrics library for C++17 and later, aimed at performance critical applications whose latency sensitive threads cannot afford to format strings or perform I/O inline.
read the full quill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monolog or quill more popular?
monolog has 21,405 GitHub stars and quill has 3,032. monolog has the larger community by that measure.
Are monolog and quill free?
Both are open source. monolog is licensed under MIT and quill under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monolog and quill?
monolog is written in PHP and quill 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 quill?
Choose monolog if you want the larger community (21,405 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose quill if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.