Loki vs Sumo Logic
Loki and Sumo Logic are both log management software. Loki is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 29k GitHub stars. Sumo Logic is a commercial product from Sumo Logic.
Which to pick
- Pick Loki when
- You already use Prometheus and Grafana and want low-cost centralised logs.
- Pick Sumo Logic when
- A mid-size or large company wants hosted log analytics and security monitoring without operating Splunk or Elasticsearch itself.
Side by side
A log aggregation system that indexes only labels and stores log content cheaply in object storage, queried from Grafana with LogQL.
A cloud log management and analytics service with metrics, dashboards and a SIEM product for security monitoring.
Full-text search over unindexed content is slow at scale, and running it distributed is complex.
Costs depend on ingest and scan volume and need watching, and its query language is its own.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service
Go
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Sumo Logic
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
219 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
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.