head to head · open source
zipkin vs doris
zipkin has 17,461 GitHub stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. doris has 15,945 stars, 3,949 forks, 1,320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin leads on adoption by 10% (17,461 vs 15,945 stars). zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0; doris is written in Java under Apache-2.0. zipkin has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, doris 25%. doris was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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
| zipkin | doris | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Java |
| Last push | 2026-08-06 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 3.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick zipkin if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick doris if
- You want the doris 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 doris fits your workflow better
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 →
About doris
Apache Doris is an open source, real time analytics and search database built on a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture. It runs on the JVM and is written in Java, licensed under Apache 2.0, and has been developed in the open for roughly nine years, with the repository showing about 15,900 stars and 3,900 forks. It lives in the data infrastructure ecosystem, where it sits alongside streaming systems, lakehouse table formats, and business intelligence tooling rather than replacing any single one of them. The project describes itself as a real time analytics and hybrid search database for AI agents.…
read the full doris overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zipkin or doris more popular?
zipkin has 17,461 GitHub stars and doris has 15,945. zipkin has the larger community by that measure.
Are zipkin and doris free?
Both are open source. zipkin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and doris under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between zipkin and doris?
zipkin is written in Java and doris 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, zipkin or doris?
Choose zipkin if you want the larger community (17,461 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose doris if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.