head to head · open source
Grafana vs zipkin
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars, 14,749 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin has 17,461 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 340% (76,791 vs 17,461 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. Grafana 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
| Grafana | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 77K | ★ 17K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 77K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 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 Grafana
Grafana is an open source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces across diverse data sources. It runs in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, designed for teams needing unified visibility into system behavior without vendor lock in. Built with TypeScript and Go, it provides a composable architecture that integrates with existing toolchains.
read the full Grafana overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or zipkin more popular?
Grafana has 76,791 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,461. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and zipkin free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and zipkin?
Grafana 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, Grafana or zipkin?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (76,791 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.