GL Grafana Loki vs GT Grafana Tempo
Compare Grafana Loki vs Grafana Tempo features, pricing, and performance metrics side-by-side to find the optimal platform for your engineering workflow.
Quick Verdict
Grafana Loki excels at log aggregation and metrics; Grafana Tempo wins on built-in capabilities. Choose Grafana Loki if you prioritize log aggregation and metrics; choose Grafana Tempo if you need built-in capabilities.
Grafana Loki vs Grafana Tempo Feature Comparison
| Feature | Grafana Loki | Grafana Tempo |
|---|---|---|
| Log Aggregation | Supported Yes Centralized log aggregation with LogQL | Not supported No Tracing backend, not log aggregation |
| Full-Stack APM | Not supported No Log aggregation only, not full APM | Not supported No Tracing only, not full APM |
| Dashboards | Supported Yes Native Grafana integration for dashboards | Supported Yes Native Grafana integration for trace visualization |
| Alerting | Supported Yes Log-based alerting rules | Supported Yes Trace-based alerting rules |
| Metrics | Supported Yes Label-based indexing (cost-efficient) | Not supported No Object-storage only — no indexing overhead |
| Query Language | Supported Yes Prometheus-compatible query language (LogQL) | Supported Yes TraceQL query language |
| Horizontal Scaling | Supported Yes Horizontal scaling via object storage | Supported Yes Horizontal scaling via object storage |
| Multi-Tenancy | Supported Yes Multi-tenant log isolation | Supported Yes Multi-tenant trace storage |
| Integrations | Supported Yes Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo integrations | Supported Yes Grafana, Loki, Mimir integrations |
| Storage Backends | Supported Yes Object storage backends (S3, GCS, Azure, MinIO) | Supported Yes S3, GCS, Azure Blob, local storage |
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About Grafana Loki
Disclosure: We may earn a commission if you click any of these links and make a purchase, at no additional cost to you. This does not influence our reviews.
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system designed to be cost-effective and Prometheus-compatible. Unlike Elasticsearch, Loki indexes only labels (not full text), making it dramatically cheaper to operate. Integrates natively with Grafana for visualization and Prometheus for correlation. Supports LogQL query language, alerting, and retention policies.
About Grafana Tempo
Disclosure: We may earn a commission if you click any of these links and make a purchase, at no additional cost to you. This does not influence our reviews.
Grafana Tempo is a distributed tracing backend that stores traces object storage only (no indexing), making it extremely cost-effective at scale. Supports OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger formats. Integrates with Grafana for trace visualization and Loki for log-trace correlation. TraceQL provides a powerful query language similar to LogQL.
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