head to head · open source
zipkin vs thanos
zipkin has 17,461 GitHub stars, 3,098 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. thanos has 14,207 stars, 2,369 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zipkin leads on adoption by 23% (17,461 vs 14,207 stars). zipkin is written in Java under Apache-2.0; thanos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. zipkin has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, thanos 17%. thanos was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (observability), 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 | thanos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 14K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-08-06 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| 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 thanos if
- You want the thanos 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 thanos 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 thanos
Thanos is a CNCF Incubating, Apache 2.0 licensed collection of Go components that composes a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity on top of an existing Prometheus deployment.
read the full thanos overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zipkin or thanos more popular?
zipkin has 17,461 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,207. zipkin has the larger community by that measure.
Are zipkin and thanos free?
Both are open source. zipkin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and thanos under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between zipkin and thanos?
zipkin is written in Java and thanos 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 thanos?
Choose zipkin if you want the larger community (17,461 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose thanos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.