head to head · open source
jaeger vs minitrace-rust
jaeger has 23,234 GitHub stars, 3,128 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. minitrace-rust has 751 stars, 46 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. jaeger leads on adoption by 2,994% (23,234 vs 751 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; minitrace-rust is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, minitrace-rust 6%. jaeger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (jaeger, opentelemetry, 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 | minitrace-rust | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 751 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-23 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 46 |
| 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 minitrace-rust if
- You want the minitrace-rust feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and minitrace-rust 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 minitrace-rust
minitrace rust is an extremely fast tracing library for the Rust programming language, intended for Rust developers who need distributed tracing in their services and want that trace data to reach backends such as Jaeger or Datadog.
read the full minitrace-rust overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or minitrace-rust more popular?
jaeger has 23,234 GitHub stars and minitrace-rust has 751. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and minitrace-rust free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and minitrace-rust under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and minitrace-rust?
jaeger is written in Go and minitrace-rust in Rust. 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 minitrace-rust?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,234 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose minitrace-rust if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.