head to head · open source
SigNoz vs jaeger
SigNoz has 32,116 GitHub stars, 2,493 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger has 23,217 stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 38% (32,116 vs 23,217 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, jaeger 13%. SigNoz was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (distributed-tracing, jaeger, 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
| SigNoz | jaeger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 23K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick SigNoz if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick jaeger if
- You want the jaeger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and jaeger fits your workflow better
About SigNoz
SigNoz is an open source, OpenTelemetry native observability platform for cloud native applications. It unifies logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards into a single tool, replacing fragmented monitoring stacks with a correlated signal pipeline. It lives in the observability ecosystem alongside tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Grafana, and is positioned as an open alternative to Datadog.
read the full SigNoz overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or jaeger more popular?
SigNoz has 32,116 GitHub stars and jaeger has 23,217. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and jaeger free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and jaeger?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript and jaeger in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, SigNoz or jaeger?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,116 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose jaeger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.