head to head · open source
Grafana Loki vs Vector
Grafana Loki has 28,908 GitHub stars, 4,112 forks, 1,620 open issues and last shipped today. Vector has 22,581 stars, 2,285 forks, 2,512 open issues and last shipped today. Grafana Loki leads on adoption by 28% (28,908 vs 22,581 stars). Grafana Loki is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Vector is written in Rust under MPL-2.0. Grafana Loki has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, Vector 10%. Grafana Loki 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
| Grafana Loki | Vector | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 23K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| 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 Vector if
- You want the Vector feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Vector 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 Vector
Vector is an open source observability data pipeline written in Rust and licensed under MPL 2.0. It operates as an end to end system for collecting, transforming, and routing logs and metrics within the cloud native monitoring ecosystem. The project is maintained by Datadog's Community Open Source Engineering team, and its topics include agent, cloud native, data transformation, datadog, etl, events, forwarder, logs, metrics, and monitoring.
read the full Vector overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Loki or Vector more popular?
Grafana Loki has 28,908 GitHub stars and Vector has 22,581. Grafana Loki has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana Loki and Vector free?
Both are open source. Grafana Loki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Vector under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana Loki and Vector?
Grafana Loki is written in Go and Vector in Rust. 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 Vector?
Choose Grafana Loki if you want the larger community (28,908 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Vector if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.