head to head · open source
OpenObserve vs yokai
OpenObserve has 22,777 GitHub stars, 1,179 forks, 598 open issues and last shipped yesterday. yokai has 840 stars, 32 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. OpenObserve leads on adoption by 2,612% (22,777 vs 840 stars). OpenObserve is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; yokai is written in Go under MIT. OpenObserve has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, yokai 4%. OpenObserve was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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
| OpenObserve | yokai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 840 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 32 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenObserve if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick yokai if
- You want the yokai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and yokai fits your workflow better
About OpenObserve
Open source Datadog alternative for logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring. Modern observability platform: 10x easier, 140x lower storage cost, high performance, petabyte scale. Cloud · Documentation · Slack · Quickstart OpenObserve (O2) is a cloud native observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, analytics, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and AI/LLM observability. It's a cost effective alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch for teams that need full observability without the complexity or cost — with Parquet columnar storage and an S3 native design that cuts storage costs by up to 140x…
read the full OpenObserve overview →
About yokai
Yokai Simple, modular, and observable Go framework for backend applications. Goals Documentation Overview Architecture Foundations Extensions Getting started Showroom Contributing Goals Building backend applications with Go is amazing. But to build production grade applications, you need to put in place a bunch of efforts and boilerplate code, introducing complexity not even related to the logic of your application (like dependencies wiring, configuration management, observability instrumentation, etc.). To solve this, Yokai was created with the following goals in mind: Simple : it is easy to use, configure and…
read the full yokai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenObserve or yokai more popular?
OpenObserve has 22,777 GitHub stars and yokai has 840. OpenObserve has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenObserve and yokai free?
Both are open source. OpenObserve is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and yokai under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenObserve and yokai?
OpenObserve is written in TypeScript and yokai 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, OpenObserve or yokai?
Choose OpenObserve if you want the larger community (22,777 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose yokai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.