head to head · open source
pinpoint vs fsmon
pinpoint has 13,870 GitHub stars, 3,737 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fsmon has 1,032 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. pinpoint leads on adoption by 1,244% (13,870 vs 1,032 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.
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Side by side
| pinpoint | fsmon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 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
Latest Release (2026/05/21) We're happy to announce the release of Pinpoint v3.1.0. Please check the release note at ( The current stable version is v3.1.0. Live Demo Take a quick look at Pinpoint with our demo! PHP, PYTHON Pinpoint also supports application written in PHP, Python. Check out our agent repository. About Pinpoint Pinpoint is an APM (Application Performance Management) tool for large scale distributed systems written in Java / PHP/PYTHON). Inspired by Dapper, Pinpoint provides a solution to help analyze the overall structure of the system and how components within them are interconnected by tracing…
read the full pinpoint overview →
About fsmon
fsmon Low level filesystem monitor utility for Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Author : pancake @ nowsecure License : MIT Designed for System administrators and incident responders Security researchers and forensic analysts Developers debugging I/O heavy applications Reverse engineers interested in observing filesystem access behavior Installation On macOS you can now install it via brew with these commands: Alternatively just run make or pick the builds from the release page. Usage The tool retrieves file system events from a specific directory and shows them in colorful format or in JSON. It is possible to…
read the full fsmon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is pinpoint or fsmon more popular?
pinpoint has 13,870 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,032. 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 (13,870 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.