Grafana Loki
Log aggregation inspired by Prometheus: index only labels, not full text. Cheap at scale.
| License | AGPL-3.0 |
| Repository | https://github.com/grafana/loki |
| GitHub stars (approx) | 24000 |
| Language | Go |
| Self-host deployment | docker, kubernetes helm, single binary |
| Commercial hosted option | yes (vendor-run) |
| Freshness status | Fresh |
| Freshness checked | 2026-04-22 |
| Categories | logs |
| Replaces SaaS | splunk, datadog, sumologic |
Loki treats logs like Prometheus treats metrics — only label metadata is indexed, payloads are compressed blobs in object storage. This makes it dramatically cheaper than Elasticsearch at scale.
Pick it if: you already use Grafana, you want logs cheaply, and most of your queries are label-scoped (“show me logs for service=api, env=prod”).
Skip it if: you run full-text search heavy workloads (see OpenSearch or Quickwit).
Deployment: scales from single-binary dev to distributed microservices for high-volume.