head to head · open source
Apache SkyWalking vs fsmon
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars, 6,632 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. fsmon has 1,032 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Apache SkyWalking leads on adoption by 2,321% (24,988 vs 1,032 stars). Apache SkyWalking is written in Java under Apache-2.0; fsmon is written in C under MIT. Apache SkyWalking has attracted 27% as many forks as stars, fsmon 16%. Apache SkyWalking was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | fsmon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-04-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 162 |
| 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 fsmon if
- You want the fsmon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and fsmon 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 fsmon
fsmon Low level filesystem monitor utility for Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Author : pancake @ nowsecure License : MIT Designed for System administrators and incident responders Security researchers and forensic analysts Developers debugging I/O heavy applications Reverse engineers interested in observing filesystem access behavior Installation On macOS you can now install it via brew with these commands: Alternatively just run make or pick the builds from the release page. Usage The tool retrieves file system events from a specific directory and shows them in colorful format or in JSON. It is possible to…
read the full fsmon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Apache SkyWalking or fsmon more popular?
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,032. Apache SkyWalking has the larger community by that measure.
Are Apache SkyWalking and fsmon free?
Both are open source. Apache SkyWalking is licensed under Apache-2.0 and fsmon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Apache SkyWalking and fsmon?
Apache SkyWalking is written in Java and fsmon 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 fsmon?
Choose Apache SkyWalking if you want the larger community (24,988 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.