head to head · open source
SigNoz vs cost-xray
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars, 2,497 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. cost-xray has 2,107 stars, 214 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 19 days ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 1,426% (32,146 vs 2,107 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; cost-xray is written in Python under MIT. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cost-xray 10%. SigNoz was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (observability), 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
| SigNoz | cost-xray | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 214 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick SigNoz if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cost-xray if
- You want the cost-xray feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and cost-xray fits your workflow better
About SigNoz
SigNoz is an open source, OpenTelemetry native observability platform for cloud native applications. It unifies logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards into a single tool, replacing fragmented monitoring stacks with a correlated signal pipeline. It lives in the observability ecosystem alongside tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Grafana, and is positioned as an open alternative to Datadog.
read the full SigNoz overview →
About cost-xray
cost xray is an MIT licensed open source observability proxy for Claude Code and Codex that captures the API traffic those agents actually send and attributes every token and dollar back to the system prompts, tool schemas, MCP blocks, tool results, cache reads and writes, and thinking blocks that produced them.
read the full cost-xray 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 SigNoz or cost-xray more popular?
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars and cost-xray has 2,107. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and cost-xray free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and cost-xray is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and cost-xray?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript and cost-xray in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, SigNoz or cost-xray?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,146 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cost-xray if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.