head to head · open source
jaeger vs cost-xray
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars, 3,122 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cost-xray has 2,107 stars, 214 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 19 days ago. jaeger leads on adoption by 1,002% (23,223 vs 2,107 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cost-xray is written in Python under MIT. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, cost-xray 10%. jaeger 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 | cost-xray | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 214 |
| 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 cost-xray if
- You want the cost-xray feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and cost-xray 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 cost-xray
cost xray is an MIT licensed open source observability proxy for Claude Code and Codex that captures the API traffic those agents actually send and attributes every token and dollar back to the system prompts, tool schemas, MCP blocks, tool results, cache reads and writes, and thinking blocks that produced them.
read the full cost-xray overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or cost-xray more popular?
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars and cost-xray has 2,107. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and cost-xray free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cost-xray under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and cost-xray?
jaeger is written in Go and cost-xray in Python. 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 cost-xray?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,223 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cost-xray if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.