head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs pinpoint
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars, 4,173 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinpoint has 13,870 stars, 3,737 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 110% (29,120 vs 13,870 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, pinpoint 27%. Grafana Loki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Grafana Loki | pinpoint | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 3.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana Loki if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pinpoint if
- You want the pinpoint feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and pinpoint fits your workflow better
About Grafana Loki
Loki: like Prometheus, but for logs. Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream. Compared to other log aggregation systems, Loki: does not do full text indexing on logs. By storing compressed, unstructured logs and only indexing metadata, Loki is simpler to operate and cheaper to run. indexes and groups log streams using the same labels you’re already using with Prometheus, enabling you to…
read the full Grafana Loki overview →
About pinpoint
Latest Release (2026/05/21) We're happy to announce the release of Pinpoint v3.1.0. Please check the release note at ( The current stable version is v3.1.0. Live Demo Take a quick look at Pinpoint with our demo! PHP, PYTHON Pinpoint also supports application written in PHP, Python. Check out our agent repository. About Pinpoint Pinpoint is an APM (Application Performance Management) tool for large scale distributed systems written in Java / PHP/PYTHON). Inspired by Dapper, Pinpoint provides a solution to help analyze the overall structure of the system and how components within them are interconnected by tracing…
read the full pinpoint overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or pinpoint more popular?
Grafana Loki has 29,120 GitHub stars and pinpoint has 13,870. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and pinpoint free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pinpoint under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and pinpoint?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and pinpoint in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Grafana Loki or pinpoint?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (29,120 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pinpoint if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.