head to head · open source
jaeger vs beyla
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars, 3,122 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. beyla has 2,132 stars, 193 forks, 109 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger leads on adoption by 989% (23,223 vs 2,132 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; beyla is written in Go under Apache-2.0. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, beyla 9%. 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 | ★ 2.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 193 |
| 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
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 →
About beyla
Beyla is a vendor agnostic, eBPF based auto instrumentation tool from Grafana that generates OpenTelemetry trace spans and Prometheus metrics for HTTP/S and gRPC services without any modification to application code or configuration, and it is aimed at platform, SRE and observability engineers who need application level telemetry from services they cannot or will not instrument by hand.
read the full beyla overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or beyla more popular?
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars and beyla has 2,132. 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 (23,223 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.