SHSelfHostIndex

Sampler Dashboard vs Jaeger

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
SA Sampler Dashboard Terminal dashboard for visualizing shell command output VS JA Jaeger End-to-end distributed tracing for microservices
FeatureSampler DashboardJaeger
CategoryDashboards & StartpagesMonitoring & Status
LicenseGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageGoGo
Setup difficultyEasyMedium
Min. RAM64 MB512 MB
Deploymentbare-metal, binarydocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 14,727★ 23,082
First released20192017
ReplacesGrafanaDatadog APM, New Relic

Why pick each one

Choose Sampler Dashboard if…

  • Runs in a terminal
  • No web stack needed
Sampler Dashboard details

Choose Jaeger if…

  • CNCF graduated project
  • Mature and widely adopted
Jaeger details

Frequently asked questions

Is Sampler Dashboard or Jaeger better?

Neither is universally better. Jaeger has the larger community, while Sampler Dashboard is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are Sampler Dashboard and Jaeger free and open-source?

Yes. Sampler Dashboard is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Jaeger under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Sampler Dashboard and Jaeger with Docker?

Sampler Dashboard: check the project docs for container support. Jaeger: yes.

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