Grafana Tempo vs Zipkin
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
VS
Zipkin
Distributed tracing system for latency troubleshooting
| Feature | Grafana Tempo | Zipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 91 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Java |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,487 | ★ 17,465 |
| First released | 2020 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog APM | Datadog APM |
What are Grafana Tempo and Zipkin?
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
Zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system that gathers timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. It collects, stores, and visualizes spans across requests.
- Span collection and storage
- Latency visualization
- Dependency diagrams
- Multiple storage backends
Grafana Tempo vs Zipkin: key differences
Grafana Tempo is written in Go, while Zipkin is built with Java. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana Tempo versus Apache-2.0 for Zipkin. Zipkin is the more established project (first released 2015), while Grafana Tempo arrived in 2020. Zipkin has the considerably larger community, at 17,465 GitHub stars versus 5,487.
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana Tempo if…
- Very cost-effective
- Simple operations
Watch out for
- Best paired with Grafana stack
- Limited standalone UI
Choose Zipkin if…
- Simple to run
- Long-established project
Watch out for
- Tracing only
- Less active than Jaeger
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Tempo or Zipkin better?
Neither is universally better. Zipkin has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Grafana Tempo and Zipkin free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana Tempo is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Zipkin under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana Tempo and Zipkin with Docker?
Grafana Tempo: yes. Zipkin: yes.