head to head · open source
jaeger vs beyla
jaeger has 23,368 GitHub stars, 3,222 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. beyla has 2,153 stars, 205 forks, 109 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger leads on adoption by 985% (23,368 vs 2,153 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; beyla is written in Go under Apache-2.0. jaeger has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, beyla 10%. beyla was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (observability), 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
| jaeger | beyla | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 205 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick jaeger if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick beyla if
- You want the beyla 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 beyla fits your workflow better
About jaeger
[![Slack chat][slack img]]( get in touch) [![Unit Tests][ci img]][ci] [![Coverage Status][cov img]][cov] [![Project+Community stats][community badge]][community stats] [![FOSSA Status][fossa img]][fossa] [![OpenSSF Scorecard][openssf img]][openssf] [![OpenSSF Best Practices][openssf bp img]][openssf bp] [![CLOMonitor][clomonitor img]][clomonitor] [![Artifact Hub][artifacthub img]][artifacthub] Jaeger a Distributed Tracing System 💥💥💥 Jaeger v2 is out! Read the blog post and try it out. Quick Start Get Jaeger running in seconds with Docker: For production deployments and more options, see the Getting Started…
read the full jaeger overview →
About beyla
Grafana Beyla Open source zero code automatic instrumentation with eBPF and OpenTelemetry. Important Update for current and future Beyla contributors Beyla has been donated to the CNCF OpenTelemetry Project, under the project name OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation or OBI for short. We are in the process of vendoring most of the code that exists in the Beyla source repository from upstream. If you are working on a PR, unless it's related to documentation, please make the PR to the upstream repository. All Beyla current maintainers work full time on the upstream repository. We expect that the process of migrating…
read the full beyla overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or beyla more popular?
jaeger has 23,368 GitHub stars and beyla has 2,153. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and beyla free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and beyla under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and beyla?
jaeger is written in Go and beyla 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, jaeger or beyla?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,368 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose beyla if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.