head to head · open source
SigNoz vs zipkin
SigNoz has 32,120 GitHub stars, 2,494 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped today. zipkin has 17,462 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. SigNoz leads on adoption by 84% (32,120 vs 17,462 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. SigNoz was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (distributed-tracing, 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 | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 17K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 zipkin if
- You want the zipkin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and zipkin 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 zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system maintained under the OpenZipkin organization and written in Java, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java and JVM ecosystem as a standalone server, while its instrumentation libraries span many languages. The project gathers the timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures, and it covers both the collection and the lookup of that data.
read the full zipkin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or zipkin more popular?
SigNoz has 32,120 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,462. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and zipkin free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and zipkin is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and zipkin?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript and zipkin in Java. 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 zipkin?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,120 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.