head to head · open source
jaeger vs zipkin
jaeger has 23,217 GitHub stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. zipkin has 17,461 stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. jaeger leads on adoption by 33% (23,217 vs 17,461 stars). jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. jaeger has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, zipkin 18%. jaeger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (distributed-tracing, observability, 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
| jaeger | zipkin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick jaeger if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 jaeger
Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it graduated as the 7th top level project in October 2019. It was originally created by Uber Technologies and then donated to the CNCF. The project is written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the OpenTelemetry and observability ecosystem: it consumes traces from OpenTelemetry SDKs and reuses components from the OpenTelemetry Collector. Its repository carries topics including cncf, distributed tracing, jaeger, observability, opentelemetry and tracing, and the project is openly gove…
read the full jaeger 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 jaeger or zipkin more popular?
jaeger has 23,217 GitHub stars and zipkin has 17,461. jaeger has the larger community by that measure.
Are jaeger and zipkin free?
Both are open source. jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and zipkin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jaeger and zipkin?
jaeger is written in Go 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, jaeger or zipkin?
Choose jaeger if you want the larger community (23,217 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose zipkin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.