head to head · open source
zipkin vs future-agi
zipkin has 17,464 GitHub stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. future-agi has 2,041 stars, 631 forks, 889 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. zipkin leads on adoption by 756% (17,464 vs 2,041 stars). zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0; future-agi is written in Python under Apache-2.0. zipkin has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, future-agi 31%. future-agi 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
| zipkin | future-agi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Python |
| Last push | 2026-08-06 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 631 |
| 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 future-agi if
- You want the future-agi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and future-agi 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 future-agi
Future AGI is an open source platform for evaluating, observing, and improving large language model and AI agent applications. It lives in the LLM operations ecosystem, where teams need tracing, evaluations, simulations, datasets, gateway routing, guardrails, and optimization in one Apache 2.0 project.
read the full future-agi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zipkin or future-agi more popular?
zipkin has 17,464 GitHub stars and future-agi has 2,041. zipkin has the larger community by that measure.
Are zipkin and future-agi free?
Both are open source. zipkin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and future-agi under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between zipkin and future-agi?
zipkin is written in Java and future-agi in Python. 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 future-agi?
Choose zipkin if you want the larger community (17,464 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose future-agi if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.