Cloud · pricing
Zipkin pricing
Zipkin publishes a single tier. Below is what it costs, what it covers, and how that compares with the cloud tools listed alongside it.
- Entry price
- Free
- Model
- Open source, no licence fee
- Tiers
- 1
- Free tier
- Yes
Zipkin plans, side by side
Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.
| Plan | Price | Features listed | Step up from the tier below |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zipkin | Free | 3 | Entry tier |
Where Zipkin stops being free
Zipkin, Free
- Full functionality
- No usage limits
- Community support
No paid tier on record
Zipkin lists a free tier and no priced tier above it in the record we hold.
What the product covers
The full Zipkin feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.
Other
- Trace collection and search
- Dependency diagram
- Simple deployment
- Pluggable storage
People bring Zipkin in for adding distributed tracing quickly without standing up heavy infrastructure, java and spring boot estates, where instrumentation support is long-established, small deployments where jaeger is more than the problem requires. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to Zipkin are worth a look before you commit to a tier.
How that compares in Cloud
Too few cloud tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.
| Tool | Entry price | Model | Rated | Head to head |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zipkin (this page) | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | |
| HAProxy | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Zipkin |
| Thanos | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Zipkin |
| Flux | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Zipkin |
| Kustomize | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Zipkin |
| VictoriaMetrics | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Zipkin |
| Rancher | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Zipkin |
Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the Zipkin badges page.
Before you pay for Zipkin
Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.
What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: a single tier at Free. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.
Zipkin runs on linux, docker, kubernetes, self-hosted, and is published by OpenZipkin of Open source project. The full record is on the Zipkin review, and the rest of the category is under best cloud tools.
Zipkin pricing questions
- How much does Zipkin cost?
- Zipkin publishes a single tier, Zipkin, at Free.
- Does Zipkin have a free plan?
- Yes. The Zipkin tier costs nothing and covers full functionality, no usage limits, community support.
- Which cloud tools can I use without paying?
- 8 of the 8 cloud tools listed alongside Zipkin have a free tier: HAProxy, Thanos, Flux, Kustomize, VictoriaMetrics.
- What am I actually paying for with Zipkin?
- The record lists 4 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for adding distributed tracing quickly without standing up heavy infrastructure, java and spring boot estates, where instrumentation support is long-established, small deployments where jaeger is more than the problem requires.
- Does Zipkin charge per user?
- The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 1 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
- Are these Zipkin prices current?
- They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
- What should I compare Zipkin against before paying?
- The closest cloud tools in this directory are HAProxy, Thanos, Flux, Kustomize. Each has a side-by-side comparison with Zipkin covering price, platforms and features.