head to head · open source
SigNoz vs tracing
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars, 2,497 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. tracing has 6,880 stars, 933 forks, 887 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 367% (32,146 vs 6,880 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; tracing is written in Rust under MIT. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, tracing 14%. 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 | tracing | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 6.9K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-05-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 933 |
| 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 tracing if
- You want the tracing feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and tracing 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 tracing
tracing is a Rust framework for instrumenting programs to collect structured, event based diagnostic information, and it is aimed at Rust developers and library authors who need observability beyond plain text log lines.
read the full tracing overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or tracing more popular?
SigNoz has 32,146 GitHub stars and tracing has 6,880. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and tracing free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and tracing is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and tracing?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript and tracing in Rust. 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 tracing?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,146 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose tracing if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.