head to head · open source
effect vs zipkin
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars, 895 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,475 stars, 3,092 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. effect leads on adoption by 0% (17,476 vs 17,475 stars). effect is written in TypeScript under MIT; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. effect has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. effect 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
| effect | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 895 | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick effect if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the MIT 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 effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect 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 effect or zipkin more popular?
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,475. effect has the larger community by that measure.
Are effect and zipkin free?
Both are open source. effect is licensed under MIT and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between effect and zipkin?
effect 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, effect or zipkin?
Choose effect if you want the larger community (17,476 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.