head to head · open source
jaeger vs monolog
jaeger has 23,217 GitHub stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. monolog has 21,406 stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. jaeger leads on adoption by 8% (23,217 vs 21,406 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; monolog is written in PHP under MIT. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, monolog 9%. jaeger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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 | monolog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 21K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 monolog if
- You want the monolog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and monolog 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 monolog
Monolog is a logging library for PHP that sends log records to files, sockets, inboxes, databases, and various web services. It ships with the handlers, formatters, and processors needed to route records where they belong, and special handlers allow more advanced logging strategies than a single output stream. The library lives in the PHP ecosystem and is distributed through Packagist as monolog/monolog . It is released under the MIT license and has been developed for sixteen years, with more than twenty one thousand stars and roughly nineteen hundred forks on GitHub.
read the full monolog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or monolog more popular?
jaeger has 23,217 GitHub stars and monolog has 21,406. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and monolog free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and monolog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and monolog?
jaeger is written in Go and monolog in PHP. 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 monolog?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,217 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose monolog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.