Jaeger vs Grafana Tempo
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Grafana Tempo
Easy-to-operate, high-scale distributed tracing backend
| Feature | Jaeger | Grafana Tempo |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 97 · Excellent | 90 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, kubernetes, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 23,234 | ★ 5,487 |
| First released | 2017 | 2020 |
| Replaces | Datadog APM, New Relic | Datadog APM |
What are Jaeger and Grafana Tempo?
Jaeger
Jaeger is a distributed tracing system used to monitor and troubleshoot transactions in complex microservice architectures. It supports trace collection, sampling, and root-cause analysis through a rich UI.
- Distributed transaction tracing
- Service dependency graphs
- Adaptive sampling
- OpenTelemetry compatible
Grafana Tempo
Grafana Tempo is a high-scale distributed tracing backend that requires only object storage and integrates with Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus. It indexes only trace IDs to keep operation simple and cheap.
- Object-storage-only backend
- Cheap large-scale tracing
- Grafana integration
- TraceQL query language
Jaeger vs Grafana Tempo: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Jaeger versus AGPL-3.0 for Grafana Tempo. Jaeger is the more established project (first released 2017), while Grafana Tempo arrived in 2020. Jaeger has the considerably larger community, at 23,234 GitHub stars versus 5,487.
Why pick each one
Choose Jaeger if…
- CNCF graduated project
- Mature and widely adopted
Watch out for
- Storage backend required
- Focused only on traces
Choose Grafana Tempo if…
- Very cost-effective
- Simple operations
Watch out for
- Best paired with Grafana stack
- Limited standalone UI
Frequently asked questions
Is Jaeger or Grafana Tempo better?
Neither is universally better. Jaeger has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Jaeger and Grafana Tempo free and open-source?
Yes. Jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Grafana Tempo under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Jaeger and Grafana Tempo with Docker?
Jaeger: yes. Grafana Tempo: yes.