head to head · open source
jaeger vs magic-trace
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars, 3,122 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. magic-trace has 6,273 stars, 209 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. jaeger leads on adoption by 270% (23,223 vs 6,273 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; magic-trace is written in OCaml under MIT. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, magic-trace 3%. jaeger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (tracing), 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 | magic-trace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 209 |
| 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 magic-trace if
- You want the magic-trace feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches OCaml
- You evaluated both and magic-trace 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 magic-trace
magic trace is an open source tracing tool, written in OCaml and released under the MIT license, that collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. It lives in the Linux performance tooling ecosystem and sits alongside perf , which it uses under the hood to drive Intel Processor Trace. Rather than sampling call stacks throughout time, magic trace snapshots a ring buffer of all control flow leading up to a chosen point in time, then renders an interactive timeline of call stacks going back a configurable span of roughly 10ms, at approximately 40ns resolution.
read the full magic-trace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or magic-trace more popular?
jaeger has 23,223 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,273. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and magic-trace free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and magic-trace under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and magic-trace?
jaeger is written in Go and magic-trace in OCaml. 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 magic-trace?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,223 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose magic-trace if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.