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Jaeger vs Uptrace

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
JA Jaeger End-to-end distributed tracing for microservices VS UP Uptrace OpenTelemetry-based tracing, metrics, and logs tool
FeatureJaegerUptrace
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score97 · Excellent88 · Excellent
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0BSL-1.1
LanguageGoGo
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM512 MB512 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, helmdocker, kubernetes, binary
GitHub stars★ 23,234★ 4,290
First released20172021
ReplacesDatadog APM, New RelicDatadog, New Relic

What are Jaeger and Uptrace?

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

Read the full Jaeger guide →

Uptrace

Uptrace is an open-source observability tool that uses OpenTelemetry to collect distributed traces, metrics, and logs. It stores data in ClickHouse and provides a clean UI for analyzing application performance.

  • Distributed tracing
  • Metrics and logs support
  • ClickHouse storage
  • OpenTelemetry-native

Read the full Uptrace guide →

Jaeger vs Uptrace: key differences

Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Jaeger versus BSL-1.1 for Uptrace. Jaeger is the more established project (first released 2017), while Uptrace arrived in 2021. Jaeger has the considerably larger community, at 23,234 GitHub stars versus 4,290.

Why pick each one

Choose Jaeger if…

  • CNCF graduated project
  • Mature and widely adopted

Watch out for

  • Storage backend required
  • Focused only on traces
Jaeger details

Choose Uptrace if…

  • Efficient ClickHouse backend
  • Easy to deploy

Watch out for

  • BSL license restrictions
  • Smaller community
Uptrace details

Frequently asked questions

Is Jaeger or Uptrace 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 Uptrace free and open-source?

Yes. Jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Uptrace under BSL-1.1. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Jaeger and Uptrace with Docker?

Jaeger: yes. Uptrace: yes.

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