head to head · open source
jaeger vs telegraf
jaeger has 23,217 GitHub stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. telegraf has 17,807 stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger leads on adoption by 30% (23,217 vs 17,807 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; telegraf is written in Go under MIT. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, telegraf 33%. telegraf was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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
| jaeger | telegraf | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 18K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 5.8K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick jaeger if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick telegraf if
- You want the telegraf feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and telegraf fits your workflow better
About jaeger
Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it graduated as the 7th top level project in October 2019. It was originally created by Uber Technologies and then donated to the CNCF. The project is written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the OpenTelemetry and observability ecosystem: it consumes traces from OpenTelemetry SDKs and reuses components from the OpenTelemetry Collector. Its repository carries topics including cncf, distributed tracing, jaeger, observability, opentelemetry and tracing, and the project is openly gove…
read the full jaeger overview →
About telegraf
Telegraf is a Go based, MIT licensed open source agent that collects, processes, aggregates, and writes metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data, and it is aimed at engineers who run their own monitoring and observability pipelines.
read the full telegraf overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jaeger or telegraf more popular?
jaeger has 23,217 GitHub stars and telegraf has 17,807. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and telegraf free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and telegraf under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and telegraf?
jaeger is written in Go and telegraf 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, jaeger or telegraf?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,217 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose telegraf if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.