head to head · open source
Sentry vs zipkin
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars, 4,854 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,461 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 157% (44,792 vs 17,461 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Sentry | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 17K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 45K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick zipkin if
- You want the zipkin 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 zipkin fits your workflow better
About Sentry
Sentry is an open source debugging platform for detecting, tracing, and fixing software issues in real time. It lives in the developer infrastructure ecosystem and provides error tracking and performance monitoring across languages, frameworks, and runtime environments.
read the full Sentry overview →
About zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system maintained under the OpenZipkin organization and written in Java, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java and JVM ecosystem as a standalone server, while its instrumentation libraries span many languages. The project gathers the timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures, and it covers both the collection and the lookup of that data.
read the full zipkin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or zipkin more popular?
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,461. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and zipkin free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and zipkin is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and zipkin?
Sentry is written in Python and zipkin 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, Sentry or zipkin?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,792 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.