SHSelfHostIndex

Kibana vs Zipkin

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?
KI Kibana Visualization and exploration for Elasticsearch data VS ZI Zipkin Distributed tracing system for latency troubleshooting
FeatureKibanaZipkin
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptJava
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM1,024 MB512 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, binarydocker, binary
GitHub stars★ 21,230★ 17,452
First released20132015
ReplacesSplunk, DatadogDatadog APM

Why pick each one

Choose Kibana if…

  • Rich visualization options
  • Mature ecosystem
Kibana details

Choose Zipkin if…

  • Simple to run
  • Long-established project
Zipkin details

Frequently asked questions

Is Kibana or Zipkin better?

Neither is universally better. Kibana has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Kibana and Zipkin free and open-source?

Yes. Kibana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Zipkin under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Kibana and Zipkin with Docker?

Kibana: yes. Zipkin: yes.

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