head to head · open source
Grafana vs zipkin
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,476 stars, 3,092 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 344% (77,638 vs 17,476 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. Grafana 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
| Grafana | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 Grafana
The open source platform for monitoring and observability Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture: Visualizations: Fast and flexible client side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs. Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic & reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad hoc queries and dynamic…
read the full Grafana overview →
About zipkin
zipkin Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data. If you have a trace ID in a log file, you can jump directly to it. Otherwise, you can query based on attributes such as service, operation name, tags and duration. Some interesting data will be summarized for you, such as the percentage of time spent in a service, and whether operations failed. The Zipkin UI also presents a dependency diagram showing how many traced requests went through each application. This…
read the full zipkin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or zipkin more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,476. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and zipkin free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and zipkin?
Grafana is written in TypeScript 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, Grafana or zipkin?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.