head to head · open source
jaeger vs evlog
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars, 3,122 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. evlog has 1,858 stars, 62 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger leads on adoption by 1,150% (23,223 vs 1,858 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; evlog is written in TypeScript under MIT. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, evlog 3%. evlog 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 | evlog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 62 |
| 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 evlog if
- You want the evlog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and evlog 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 evlog
evlog is an MIT licensed, TypeScript first logging library that emits one wide event per operation — full request context plus a duration — for Nuxt and Next.js teams and for the AI coding agents that read their logs.
read the full evlog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or evlog more popular?
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars and evlog has 1,858. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and evlog free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and evlog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and evlog?
jaeger is written in Go and evlog in TypeScript. 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 evlog?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,223 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose evlog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.