Loki vs Splunk Enterprise
Loki and Splunk Enterprise are both log management software. Loki is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 29k GitHub stars. Splunk Enterprise is a commercial product from Cisco.
Which to pick
- Pick Loki when
- You already use Prometheus and Grafana and want low-cost centralised logs.
- Pick Splunk Enterprise when
- A large organisation needs one platform for security and operations data at high volume and has staff who can write SPL and run the deployment.
Side by side
A log aggregation system that indexes only labels and stores log content cheaply in object storage, queried from Grafana with LogQL.
Indexes and searches machine data such as logs, metrics and events, with its own query language (SPL), dashboards, alerting and a security (SIEM) layer on top.
Full-text search over unindexed content is slow at scale, and running it distributed is complex.
Licensing is priced on data volume or compute and gets expensive quickly, and running it on your own servers takes dedicated administrators.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service (both)
Go
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Cisco
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
29k GitHub stars
No Wikipedia article of its own
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v3.7.9.
Not known
Other comparisons
More log management tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.