head to head · open source
pinpoint vs fsmon
pinpoint has 13,872 GitHub stars, 3,749 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fsmon has 1,028 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. pinpoint leads on adoption by 1,249% (13,872 vs 1,028 stars). pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0; fsmon is written in C under MIT. pinpoint has attracted 27% as many forks as stars, fsmon 16%. pinpoint 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| pinpoint | fsmon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-04-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.7K | ⑂ 162 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick pinpoint if
- You weight community size — 14K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick fsmon if
- You want the fsmon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and fsmon fits your workflow better
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 →
About fsmon
fsmon is a low level, cross platform filesystem monitor that reports kernel level file events on Linux, Android, iOS and macOS as colourful terminal output or JSON, built for system administrators, incident responders, security researchers, forensic analysts, developers debugging I/O heavy applications, and reverse engineers.
read the full fsmon overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is pinpoint or fsmon more popular?
pinpoint has 13,872 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,028. pinpoint has the larger community by that measure.
Are pinpoint and fsmon free?
Both are open source. pinpoint is licensed under Apache-2.0 and fsmon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between pinpoint and fsmon?
pinpoint is written in Java and fsmon in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, pinpoint or fsmon?
Choose pinpoint if you want the larger community (13,872 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.