head to head · open source
pinpoint vs magic-trace
pinpoint has 13,870 GitHub stars, 3,737 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. magic-trace has 6,346 stars, 223 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. pinpoint leads on adoption by 119% (13,870 vs 6,346 stars). pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0; magic-trace is written in OCaml under MIT. pinpoint has attracted 27% as many forks as stars, magic-trace 4%. 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 | magic-trace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.7K | ⑂ 223 |
| 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 magic-trace if
- You want the magic-trace feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches OCaml
- You evaluated both and magic-trace 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 magic-trace
magic trace Overview magic trace collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. People have used it to: figure out why an application running in production handles some requests slowly while simultaneously handling a sea of uninteresting requests, look at what their code is actually doing instead of what they think it's doing, get a history of what their application was doing before it crashed, instead of a mere stacktrace at that final instant, ...and much more! magic trace: has 2% 10% overhead, doesn't require application changes to use, traces every function call with 40ns…
read the full magic-trace 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 magic-trace more popular?
pinpoint has 13,870 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,346. pinpoint has the larger community by that measure.
Are pinpoint and magic-trace free?
Both are open source. pinpoint is licensed under Apache-2.0 and magic-trace under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between pinpoint and magic-trace?
pinpoint is written in Java and magic-trace in OCaml. 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 magic-trace?
Choose pinpoint if you want the larger community (13,870 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose magic-trace if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.