head to head · open source
jaeger vs magic-trace
jaeger has 23,375 GitHub stars, 3,223 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped yesterday. magic-trace has 6,345 stars, 224 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. jaeger leads on adoption by 268% (23,375 vs 6,345 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; magic-trace is written in OCaml under MIT. jaeger has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, magic-trace 4%. 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 | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 224 |
| 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
[![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 magic-trace
magic trace Overview magic trace collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. People have used it to: figure out why an application running in production handles some requests slowly while simultaneously handling a sea of uninteresting requests, look at what their code is actually doing instead of what they think it's doing, get a history of what their application was doing before it crashed, instead of a mere stacktrace at that final instant, ...and much more! magic trace: has 2% 10% overhead, doesn't require application changes to use, traces every function call with 40ns…
read the full magic-trace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or magic-trace more popular?
jaeger has 23,375 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,345. 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 (23,375 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.