head to head · open source
Apache SkyWalking vs FASTER
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars, 6,632 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. FASTER has 6,635 stars, 592 forks, 36 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. Apache SkyWalking leads on adoption by 277% (24,988 vs 6,635 stars). Apache SkyWalking is written in Java under Apache-2.0; FASTER is written in C# under MIT. Apache SkyWalking has attracted 27% as many forks as stars, FASTER 9%. Apache SkyWalking was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (logging), 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 | FASTER | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 6.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 592 |
| 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 FASTER if
- You want the FASTER feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and FASTER 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 FASTER
[!IMPORTANT] This repository is no longer actively maintained. We encourage users to look at Garnet — this project evolves FASTER into a full fledged remote cache store with strong performance (throughput and latency), scalability, storage, recovery, and more. Garnet's storage engine, Tsavorite , is a highly optimized and evolved fork of FASTER. Introduction Managing large application state easily, resiliently, and with high performance is one of the hardest problems in the cloud today. The FASTER project offers two artifacts to help tackle this problem. FASTER Log is a high performance concurrent persistent…
read the full FASTER overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Apache SkyWalking or FASTER more popular?
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars and FASTER has 6,635. Apache SkyWalking has the larger community by that measure.
Are Apache SkyWalking and FASTER free?
Both are open source. Apache SkyWalking is licensed under Apache-2.0 and FASTER under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Apache SkyWalking and FASTER?
Apache SkyWalking is written in Java and FASTER in C#. 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 FASTER?
Choose Apache SkyWalking if you want the larger community (24,988 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose FASTER if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.