head to head · open source
worldmonitor vs zipkin
worldmonitor has 86,684 GitHub stars, 13,147 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,461 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. worldmonitor leads on adoption by 396% (86,684 vs 17,461 stars). worldmonitor is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. worldmonitor has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. worldmonitor 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
| worldmonitor | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 13K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick worldmonitor if
- You weight community size — 87K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 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 worldmonitor
World Monitor is an open source, real time global intelligence dashboard in TypeScript that aggregates news with AI, monitors geopolitics and infrastructure, and unifies all of it into a single situational awareness interface for analysts, journalists, researchers, and operations teams who need cross domain awareness they can self host.
read the full worldmonitor 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 worldmonitor or zipkin more popular?
worldmonitor has 86,684 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,461. worldmonitor has the larger community by that measure.
Are worldmonitor and zipkin free?
Both are open source. worldmonitor is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between worldmonitor and zipkin?
worldmonitor 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, worldmonitor or zipkin?
Choose worldmonitor if you want the larger community (86,684 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.