head to head · open source
SigNoz vs magic-trace
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars, 2,497 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. magic-trace has 6,273 stars, 209 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 412% (32,146 vs 6,273 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; magic-trace is written in OCaml under MIT. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, magic-trace 3%. SigNoz 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
| SigNoz | magic-trace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 209 |
| 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 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 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 magic-trace
magic trace is an open source tracing tool, written in OCaml and released under the MIT license, that collects and displays high resolution traces of what a process is doing. It lives in the Linux performance tooling ecosystem and sits alongside perf , which it uses under the hood to drive Intel Processor Trace. Rather than sampling call stacks throughout time, magic trace snapshots a ring buffer of all control flow leading up to a chosen point in time, then renders an interactive timeline of call stacks going back a configurable span of roughly 10ms, at approximately 40ns resolution.
read the full magic-trace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or magic-trace more popular?
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,273. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and magic-trace free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and magic-trace is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and magic-trace?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript 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, SigNoz or magic-trace?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,146 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose magic-trace if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.