head to head · open source
Apache SkyWalking vs litter
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars, 6,632 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. litter has 1,655 stars, 61 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Apache SkyWalking leads on adoption by 1,410% (24,988 vs 1,655 stars). Apache SkyWalking is written in Java under Apache-2.0; litter is written in Go under MIT. Apache SkyWalking has attracted 27% as many forks as stars, litter 4%. 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 | litter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 61 |
| 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 litter if
- You want the litter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and litter 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 litter
Litter Litter is a pretty printer library for Go data structures to aid in debugging and testing. Litter is provided by Sanity: The Headless CMS Construction Kit Litter named for the fact that it outputs literals , which you litter your output with. As a side benefit, all Litter output is syntactically correct Go. You can use Litter to emit data during debug, and it's also really nice for "snapshot data" in unit tests, since it produces consistent, sorted output. Litter was inspired by Spew, but focuses on terseness and readability. Basic example This: will output: Use in tests Litter is a great alternative to…
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Apache SkyWalking or litter more popular?
Apache SkyWalking has 24,988 GitHub stars and litter has 1,655. Apache SkyWalking has the larger community by that measure.
Are Apache SkyWalking and litter free?
Both are open source. Apache SkyWalking is licensed under Apache-2.0 and litter under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Apache SkyWalking and litter?
Apache SkyWalking is written in Java and litter 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 litter?
Choose Apache SkyWalking if you want the larger community (24,988 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.