head to head · open source
Uptime Kuma vs zipkin
Uptime Kuma has 91,477 GitHub stars, 8,426 forks, 805 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,461 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Uptime Kuma leads on adoption by 424% (91,477 vs 17,461 stars). Uptime Kuma is written in JavaScript under MIT; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Uptime Kuma has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. Uptime Kuma 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Uptime Kuma | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 91K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Uptime Kuma if
- You weight community size — 91K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- 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 Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is a free, MIT licensed, self hosted monitoring tool with a reactive web dashboard, built for operators and teams that want to watch their own HTTP, TCP, and DNS endpoints and keep the resulting data on their own infrastructure.
read the full Uptime Kuma 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 →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Uptime Kuma or zipkin more popular?
Uptime Kuma has 91,477 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,461. Uptime Kuma has the larger community by that measure.
Are Uptime Kuma and zipkin free?
Both are open source. Uptime Kuma is licensed under MIT and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Uptime Kuma and zipkin?
Uptime Kuma is written in JavaScript 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, Uptime Kuma or zipkin?
Choose Uptime Kuma if you want the larger community (91,477 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.