SHSelfHostIndex

Heimdall 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?
HE Heimdall Simple application dashboard and launcher VS JA Jaeger End-to-end distributed tracing for microservices
FeatureHeimdallJaeger
CategoryDashboards & StartpagesMonitoring & Status
LicenseMITApache-2.0
LanguagePHPGo
Setup difficultyEasyMedium
Min. RAM256 MB512 MB
Deploymentdockerdocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 9,291★ 23,082
First released20172017
ReplacesHeimdallDatadog APM, New Relic

Why pick each one

Choose Heimdall if…

  • Very simple to set up
  • Clean look
  • Low maintenance
Heimdall details

Choose Jaeger if…

  • CNCF graduated project
  • Mature and widely adopted
Jaeger details

Frequently asked questions

Is Heimdall or Jaeger better?

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

Are Heimdall and Jaeger free and open-source?

Yes. Heimdall is licensed under MIT and Jaeger under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Heimdall and Jaeger with Docker?

Heimdall: yes. Jaeger: yes.

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