Zipkin

Distributed tracing system for microservice latency

As of 29 August 2026, Zipkin is free to use. One of the original distributed tracing systems. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Zipkin is made by OpenZipkin, available on Linux, Self-hosted.

Visit siteVisit Zipkin

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

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.

Zipkinvs
Jaeger
Jaeger: The more actively developed CNCF tracing system with a larger community
Zipkinvs
OpenTelemetry
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

Best Cloud software for

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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.