head to head · open source
zipkin vs fsmon
zipkin has 17,464 GitHub stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. fsmon has 1,028 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. zipkin leads on adoption by 1,599% (17,464 vs 1,028 stars). zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0; fsmon is written in C under MIT. zipkin has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, fsmon 16%. zipkin was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (tracing), 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 | fsmon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | C |
| Last push | 2026-08-06 | 2026-04-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 162 |
| 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 fsmon if
- You want the fsmon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and fsmon 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 fsmon
fsmon is a low level, cross platform filesystem monitor that reports kernel level file events on Linux, Android, iOS and macOS as colourful terminal output or JSON, built for system administrators, incident responders, security researchers, forensic analysts, developers debugging I/O heavy applications, and reverse engineers.
read the full fsmon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zipkin or fsmon more popular?
zipkin has 17,464 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,028. zipkin has the larger community by that measure.
Are zipkin and fsmon free?
Both are open source. zipkin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and fsmon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between zipkin and fsmon?
zipkin is written in Java and fsmon in C. 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 fsmon?
Choose zipkin if you want the larger community (17,464 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.