Zipkinvs
Jaeger
Jaeger: The more actively developed CNCF tracing system with a larger community
Overview
What Zipkin does
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system, originally built at Twitter and modelled on Google’s Dapper paper. It collects timing data across services and presents traces so latency can be attributed to the service actually responsible. It is notably lighter than its successors: a single process with in-memory storage will run usefully for evaluation, and its data model is small enough to understand quickly. That simplicity is its main argument now, since Jaeger has more momentum and OpenTelemetry has become the standard instrumentation layer for both.
What people use it 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
Related searches
The honest half
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 Zipkin.
- Less active development and smaller community momentum than Jaeger
- Fewer features: sampling, storage options and UI are all more limited
- The interface is dated and slower to work with on large trace volumes
- Tracing alone still leaves metrics and logs in separate tools during an incident
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Zipkin
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.
- ZipkinvsOpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry: The instrumentation standard that now feeds both, rather than a competitor
Pricing
What Zipkin costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Zipkin
Free
- Full functionality
- No usage limits
- Community support
Capabilities
Features
Trace collection and search
Find traces by service, operation, tag or duration
Dependency diagram
Service dependency graph derived from collected traces
Simple deployment
Runs as a single process, with in-memory storage for evaluation
Pluggable storage
Elasticsearch, Cassandra and MySQL 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 Zipkin free?
Yes, open source with no licence fee.
Zipkin or Jaeger?
Jaeger has more momentum, more features and CNCF backing. Zipkin is lighter and quicker to stand up, and remains well supported in the Java and Spring ecosystem.
Does Zipkin work with OpenTelemetry?
Yes. OpenTelemetry can export to Zipkin, which is now the usual way to instrument for it.
Keep looking
Where to go from Zipkin
- Zipkin alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Zipkin pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Zipkin badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Cloud softwareThe full category
- Best Cloud softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Zipkin, 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.
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