head to head · open source
SigNoz vs opentelemetry-go
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars, 2,497 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. opentelemetry-go has 6,555 stars, 1,475 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 390% (32,146 vs 6,555 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; opentelemetry-go is written in Go under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, opentelemetry-go 23%. SigNoz was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), 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.
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Side by side
| SigNoz | opentelemetry-go | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 6.6K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 opentelemetry-go if
- You want the opentelemetry-go feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and opentelemetry-go 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 opentelemetry-go
OpenTelemetry Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry, the vendor neutral observability framework. It provides a set of APIs that let Go programs directly measure the performance and behavior of their own software, then send the resulting telemetry to observability platforms. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as the module go.opentelemetry.io/otel , published on pkg.go.dev and licensed under Apache 2.0. It is a long running, actively maintained repository, roughly seven years old, with a large contributor base and a steady release cadence.
read the full opentelemetry-go overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or opentelemetry-go more popular?
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars and opentelemetry-go has 6,555. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and opentelemetry-go free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and opentelemetry-go is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and opentelemetry-go?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript and opentelemetry-go in Go. 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 opentelemetry-go?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,146 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose opentelemetry-go if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.