head to head · open source
beszel vs pinpoint
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars, 1,025 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinpoint has 13,872 stars, 3,749 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel leads on adoption by 84% (25,541 vs 13,872 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, pinpoint 27%. beszel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), 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
| beszel | pinpoint | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 3.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pinpoint if
- You want the pinpoint feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and pinpoint fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About pinpoint
Pinpoint is an open source Application Performance Management (APM) tool built for large scale distributed systems. It is written primarily in Java and also supports applications written in PHP and Python through a separate agent repository. Inspired by Google's Dapper, it provides a way to analyze the overall structure of a system and how the components inside it are interconnected by tracing transactions across distributed applications. The project lives in the Java ecosystem, is licensed under Apache 2.0, and has been developed for around twelve years, with its current stable release being v3.1.0.…
read the full pinpoint overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or pinpoint more popular?
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars and pinpoint has 13,872. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and pinpoint free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and pinpoint under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and pinpoint?
beszel is written in Go and pinpoint in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, beszel or pinpoint?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,541 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pinpoint if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.