head to head · open source
Apache SkyWalking vs beyla
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars, 6,632 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. beyla has 2,153 stars, 205 forks, 109 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Apache SkyWalking leads on adoption by 1,061% (24,988 vs 2,153 stars). Apache SkyWalking is written in Java under Apache-2.0; beyla is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Apache SkyWalking has attracted 27% as many forks as stars, beyla 10%. beyla was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ebpf, observability), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Apache SkyWalking | beyla | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 205 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Apache SkyWalking if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick beyla if
- You want the beyla feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and beyla fits your workflow better
About Apache SkyWalking
Apache SkyWalking ========== SkyWalking : an APM (Application Performance Monitoring) system, especially designed for microservices, cloud native and container based architectures. Abstract SkyWalking is an open source APM system that provides monitoring, tracing and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. Distributed Tracing End to end distributed tracing. Service topology analysis, service centric observability and APIs dashboards. Agents for your stack Java, .Net Core, PHP, NodeJS, Golang, LUA, Rust, C++, Client JavaScript and Python agents with active development and…
read the full Apache SkyWalking overview →
About beyla
Grafana Beyla Open source zero code automatic instrumentation with eBPF and OpenTelemetry. Important Update for current and future Beyla contributors Beyla has been donated to the CNCF OpenTelemetry Project, under the project name OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation or OBI for short. We are in the process of vendoring most of the code that exists in the Beyla source repository from upstream. If you are working on a PR, unless it's related to documentation, please make the PR to the upstream repository. All Beyla current maintainers work full time on the upstream repository. We expect that the process of migrating…
read the full beyla overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Apache SkyWalking or beyla more popular?
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars and beyla has 2,153. Apache SkyWalking has the larger community by that measure.
Are Apache SkyWalking and beyla free?
Both are open source. Apache SkyWalking is licensed under Apache-2.0 and beyla under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Apache SkyWalking and beyla?
Apache SkyWalking is written in Java and beyla in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Apache SkyWalking or beyla?
Choose Apache SkyWalking if you want the larger community (24,988 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose beyla if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.