head to head · open source
zipkin vs fsmon
zipkin has 17,475 GitHub stars, 3,092 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. fsmon has 1,032 stars, 162 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. zipkin leads on adoption by 1,593% (17,475 vs 1,032 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 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 →
About fsmon
fsmon Low level filesystem monitor utility for Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Author : pancake @ nowsecure License : MIT Designed for System administrators and incident responders Security researchers and forensic analysts Developers debugging I/O heavy applications Reverse engineers interested in observing filesystem access behavior Installation On macOS you can now install it via brew with these commands: Alternatively just run make or pick the builds from the release page. Usage The tool retrieves file system events from a specific directory and shows them in colorful format or in JSON. It is possible to…
read the full fsmon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zipkin or fsmon more popular?
zipkin has 17,475 GitHub stars and fsmon has 1,032. 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 (17,475 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose fsmon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.