head to head · open source
zipkin vs thanos
zipkin has 17,476 GitHub stars, 3,092 forks, 175 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. thanos has 14,266 stars, 2,404 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. zipkin leads on adoption by 23% (17,476 vs 14,266 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 | 2026-10-30 |
| 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 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 thanos
📢 ThanosCon happened on 19th March 2024 as a co located half day on KubeCon EU in Paris. Overview Thanos is a set of components that can be composed into a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity, which can be added seamlessly on top of existing Prometheus deployments. Thanos is a CNCF Incubating project. Thanos leverages the Prometheus 2.0 storage format to cost efficiently store historical metric data in any object storage while retaining fast query latencies. Additionally, it provides a global query view across all Prometheus installations and can merge data from Prometheus HA pairs on…
read the full thanos overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zipkin or thanos more popular?
zipkin has 17,476 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,266. 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 (17,476 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.