head to head · open source
SigNoz vs magic-trace
SigNoz has 32,525 GitHub stars, 2,576 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped yesterday. magic-trace has 6,346 stars, 223 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 413% (32,525 vs 6,346 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 4%. 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 | ★ 33K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 223 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick SigNoz if
- You weight community size — 33K 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
中文 · Deutsch · Português SigNoz is an open source observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. We’re building an enterprise grade alternative to fragmented monitoring stacks, with logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards in one place. Choose how to run SigNoz SigNoz Cloud (Recommended) Fully managed SigNoz with a 30 day free trial, no credit card required, usage based pricing that starts at $49, and regional data hosting. Start free → Enterprise Enterprise Cloud, BYOC, or Enterprise Self Hosted with compliance, support, custom retention, RBAC, ingestion controls, data residency, and region selection…
read the full SigNoz 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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or magic-trace more popular?
SigNoz has 32,525 GitHub stars and magic-trace has 6,346. 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 (32,525 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose magic-trace if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.