Loki vs OpenObserve
Loki and OpenObserve are both log management software. Loki is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 29k GitHub stars. OpenObserve is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 23k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Loki when
- You already use Prometheus and Grafana and want low-cost centralised logs.
- Pick OpenObserve when
- You want a cheaper self-hosted alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk or Datadog for logs and traces.
Side by side
A log aggregation system that indexes only labels and stores log content cheaply in object storage, queried from Grafana with LogQL.
An observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring and session replay, storing data on object storage in a single binary.
Full-text search over unindexed content is slow at scale, and running it distributed is complex.
AGPL license, and SSO and some enterprise features require a paid license.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service (both)
Go
Rust, TypeScript and Vue
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft) (both)
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes. (both)
29k GitHub stars
23k GitHub stars
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v3.7.9.
Established: started 3 years ago, latest release v1.1.2.
Other comparisons
More log management tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.