head to head · open source
zipkin vs Gatus
zipkin has 17,475 GitHub stars, 3,092 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Gatus has 12,470 stars, 885 forks, 382 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. zipkin leads on adoption by 40% (17,475 vs 12,470 stars). zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0; Gatus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. zipkin has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, Gatus 7%. Gatus 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 | Gatus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-08-06 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 885 |
| 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 Gatus if
- You want the Gatus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Gatus 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 Gatus
Gatus is a developer oriented health dashboard that gives you the ability to monitor your services using HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and even DNS queries as well as evaluate the result of said queries by using a list of conditions on values like the status code, the response time, the certificate expiration, the body and many others. The icing on top is that each of these health checks can be paired with alerting via Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Discord, Twilio and many more. I personally deploy it in my Kubernetes cluster and let it monitor the status of my core applications: Looking for a managed solution? Check out…
read the full Gatus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zipkin or Gatus more popular?
zipkin has 17,475 GitHub stars and Gatus has 12,470. zipkin has the larger community by that measure.
Are zipkin and Gatus free?
Both are open source. zipkin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Gatus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between zipkin and Gatus?
zipkin is written in Java and Gatus in Go. 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 Gatus?
Choose zipkin if you want the larger community (17,475 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Gatus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.