head to head · open source
beszel vs zipkin
beszel has 25,469 GitHub stars, 1,021 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,462 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. beszel leads on adoption by 46% (25,469 vs 17,462 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. 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 | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-06 |
| 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 zipkin if
- You want the zipkin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and zipkin 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 zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system maintained under the OpenZipkin organization and written in Java, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java and JVM ecosystem as a standalone server, while its instrumentation libraries span many languages. The project gathers the timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures, and it covers both the collection and the lookup of that data.
read the full zipkin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or zipkin more popular?
beszel has 25,469 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,462. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and zipkin free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and zipkin?
beszel is written in Go and zipkin in Java. 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 zipkin?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,469 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.