head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs pinpoint
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars, 4,115 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinpoint has 13,872 stars, 3,749 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 108% (28,917 vs 13,872 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 | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 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
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system designed as the log oriented counterpart to Prometheus. It operates within the cloud native observability ecosystem, specifically targeting Kubernetes and containerized environments. Loki avoids expensive full text indexing by indexing only metadata labels attached to log streams, storing the raw log content in compressed form. This design choice makes Loki significantly simpler to operate and more cost effective than traditional log systems that index every word.
read the full Grafana Loki overview →
About pinpoint
Pinpoint is an open source Application Performance Management (APM) tool built for large scale distributed systems. It is written primarily in Java and also supports applications written in PHP and Python through a separate agent repository. Inspired by Google's Dapper, it provides a way to analyze the overall structure of a system and how the components inside it are interconnected by tracing transactions across distributed applications. The project lives in the Java ecosystem, is licensed under Apache 2.0, and has been developed for around twelve years, with its current stable release being v3.1.0.…
read the full pinpoint overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or pinpoint more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,917 GitHub stars and pinpoint has 13,872. 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 (28,917 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.