head to head · open source
SigNoz vs parca
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars, 2,497 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. parca has 4,972 stars, 259 forks, 206 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 547% (32,146 vs 4,972 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; parca is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, parca 5%. 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.
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Side by side
| SigNoz | parca | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 259 |
| 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 parca if
- You want the parca feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and parca 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 parca
Parca is an open source continuous profiling system that records CPU and memory usage down to the line number and across time, built for platform, SRE, and performance engineers who run production workloads on Kubernetes or systemd.
read the full parca overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or parca more popular?
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars and parca has 4,972. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and parca free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and parca is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and parca?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript and parca in TypeScript. 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 parca?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,146 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose parca if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.