Grafana OnCall vs Grafana Loki

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

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FeatureGrafana OnCallGrafana Loki
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0AGPL-3.0
LanguagePythonGo
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM512 MB512 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, helmdocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 3,889★ 28,687
First released20212018
ReplacesPagerDuty, OpsgenieSplunk, Datadog Logs

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana OnCall if…

  • Strong PagerDuty alternative
  • Integrates with Grafana
Grafana OnCall details

Choose Grafana Loki if…

  • Cheap to run compared to full-text indexers
  • Familiar Prometheus-style labels
Grafana Loki details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana OnCall or Grafana Loki better?

Neither is universally better. Grafana Loki has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Grafana OnCall and Grafana Loki free and open-source?

Yes. Grafana OnCall is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Grafana Loki under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Grafana OnCall and Grafana Loki with Docker?

Grafana OnCall: yes. Grafana Loki: yes.

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