Jaeger

Open-source end-to-end distributed tracing

As of 29 August 2026, Jaeger is free to use. CNCF-graduated distributed tracing. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Jaeger is made by Cloud Native Computing Foundation, available on Linux, Self-hosted.

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Overview

What Jaeger does

Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing system, originally built at Uber and now a graduated CNCF project. It answers the question monitoring dashboards cannot in a microservice architecture: a request took four seconds, and which of the fourteen services it touched was responsible. It collects spans from instrumented services, stores them, and provides a UI for searching traces and viewing them as flame graphs. Modern deployments generally instrument with OpenTelemetry and use Jaeger as the storage and query backend.

What people use it for

Finding which service in a request path causes the latency
Understanding real service dependencies rather than the diagram on the wiki
Debugging failures that only appear under production traffic patterns

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Jaeger.

Tracing is only as good as the instrumentation, and partial instrumentation produces misleading gaps
Storage is the real operational cost: high-volume tracing on Elasticsearch or Cassandra is a cluster to run and pay for
Traces alone, without correlated metrics and logs, leave you switching between tools during an incident

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Jaeger

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Jaegervs
Datadog
Datadog: Commercial APM that bundles tracing with metrics and logs, removing the storage operations Jaeger leaves you
Jaegervs
Grafana
Grafana: Frequently the visualisation layer alongside Jaeger rather than a replacement for it

Pricing

What Jaeger costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Jaeger

Free

Full functionality
No usage limits
Community support

Capabilities

Features

Distributed trace search
Find traces by service, operation, tag or duration
Dependency graph
Derived map of which services call which
Adaptive sampling
Keeps trace volume manageable without losing rare slow requests
Pluggable storage
Elasticsearch, Cassandra and OpenSearch backends

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Jaeger free?

Yes, open source and CNCF-graduated. Costs are the storage backend you run.

Do I use Jaeger or OpenTelemetry?

Both, usually. Instrument with OpenTelemetry and use Jaeger to store and query the traces.

Does Jaeger handle metrics and logs?

No. It is a tracing system. Metrics and logs need Prometheus, Loki or an equivalent.

Keep looking

Where to go from Jaeger

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Jaeger, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.