head to head · open source
beszel vs jaeger
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger has 23,217 stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. beszel leads on adoption by 10% (25,459 vs 23,217 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, jaeger 13%. beszel 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
| beszel | jaeger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 23K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick jaeger if
- You want the jaeger 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 jaeger fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About jaeger
Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it graduated as the 7th top level project in October 2019. It was originally created by Uber Technologies and then donated to the CNCF. The project is written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the OpenTelemetry and observability ecosystem: it consumes traces from OpenTelemetry SDKs and reuses components from the OpenTelemetry Collector. Its repository carries topics including cncf, distributed tracing, jaeger, observability, opentelemetry and tracing, and the project is openly gove…
read the full jaeger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or jaeger more popular?
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars and jaeger has 23,217. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and jaeger free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and jaeger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and jaeger?
beszel is written in Go and jaeger 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, beszel or jaeger?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,459 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose jaeger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.