head to head · open source
beszel vs zipkin
beszel has 26,783 GitHub stars, 1,138 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. zipkin has 17,476 stars, 3,092 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. beszel leads on adoption by 53% (26,783 vs 17,476 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. beszel 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
| beszel | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-01 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 27K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 beszel
Beszel Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform that includes Docker statistics, historical data, and alert functions. It has a friendly web interface, simple configuration, and is ready to use out of the box. It supports automatic backup, multi user, OAuth authentication, and API access. Features Lightweight : Smaller and less resource intensive than leading solutions. Simple : Easy setup with little manual configuration required. Docker stats : Tracks CPU, memory, and network usage history for each container. ZFS : Tracks pool capacity, health, and I/O, plus per dataset usage. Alerts : Configurable…
read the full beszel overview →
About zipkin
zipkin Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data. If you have a trace ID in a log file, you can jump directly to it. Otherwise, you can query based on attributes such as service, operation name, tags and duration. Some interesting data will be summarized for you, such as the percentage of time spent in a service, and whether operations failed. The Zipkin UI also presents a dependency diagram showing how many traced requests went through each application. This…
read the full zipkin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or zipkin more popular?
beszel has 26,783 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,476. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and zipkin free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and zipkin?
beszel is written in Go 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, beszel or zipkin?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (26,783 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.