Top 10 Grafana Tempo Alternatives 2024

Grafana Tempo is designed to simplify distributed tracing at scale while keeping costs low and infrastructure requirements minimal.

Although Grafana Tempo is one of the leading tools for scalable distributed tracing, several other options are available for effective tracing and observability.

If you're interested in exploring different options, here’s a quick look at the top 10 alternatives to Grafana Tempo.

Grafana Tempo key features

Grafana Tempo delivers scalable, cost-efficient distributed tracing with minimal infrastructure overhead. Unlike traditional tracing tools that rely on complex databases, Tempo uses object storage for trace retention, making it easier to scale and reducing operational costs.

Tempo also integrates smoothly with Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana, providing a unified observability experience for metrics, logs, and traces.

This makes it flexible and easy to adopt within existing systems. Whether self-hosted or managed via Grafana Cloud Traces, it offers deployment options to fit different needs, including a free tier with up to 50GB of traces.

After briefly reviewing the features of Grafana Tempo, let's dive into some of its top alternatives and compare how they measure up.

The top Grafana Tempo alternatives in 2024

Let’s take a quick peek at how these tools measure up when it comes to distributed tracing and observability features:

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is your all-in-one observability platform for effortless log management, metrics tracking, and real-time alerting.

While distributed tracing is still underdevelopment (and trust us, it’s worth the wait), Better Stack already packs a punch. Its sleek, intuitive interface lets you stay on top of logs, metrics, and incidents without breaking a sweat.

And when things go sideways? You’ll get instant alerts via email, SMS, or phone — complete with error reports and screenshots — so you can fix those bugs quickly.

🌟 Key features

• Logs and metrics management
  
• Incident management
  
• Infransture moniotring
• Status pages
  

➕ Pros

• Combines logs, metrics, uptime, and incident management into one intuitive platform
• Captures screenshots of app failures for easy root-cause identification
• Includes unlimited phone, SMS, push, and Slack alerts.
  
• Supports SQL, PromQL, and no-code queries with an intuitive builder

➖ Cons

• Distributed tracing is in development and will be available soon

💲 Pricing

Better Stack’s free plan offers ten monitors, 3 GB of log retention, and a status page.

Need more? The pay-as-you-go plan starts at $29/month, providing 30 GB of logs, unlimited phone and SMS alerts, and advanced incident management features.

Explore all the details on the Better Stack pricing page.

2. Jaeger

Jaeger is a popular tool for distributed tracing with a sleek web UI that helps you visualize dependencies and trace flows.

If you're dealing with performance bottlenecks, weird delays, or mysterious errors, Jaeger maps it all out, showing you exactly where things are getting tangled.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed context propagation
• Transaction monitoring
• Root cause analysis and performance optimization
• Service dependency analysis via directed acyclic graphs

➕ Pros

• Comprehensive visualization and advanced dependency graphs
• Supports OpenTelemetry and Zipkin formats
  
• Scales easily with no single points of failure
  
• Visualize complex workflows with detailed trace graphs
  
• Multiple storage backends (Cassandra, Elasticsearch)
  
• Strong community support and extensive documentation

➖ Cons

• Steeper learning curve compared to Grafana Tempo’s simpler setup
• Limited native integrations compared to Grafana’s unified ecosystem.

💲 Pricing

Jaeger is 100% open source and free! If you’re looking for a community-driven, scalable tracing tool, Jaeger delivers without the price tag.

3. Zipkin

Zipkin is a lightweight, open-source distributed tracing tool that helps you track latency issues in your microservices architecture.

If you want a clear picture of how requests flow through your services, Zipkin connects the dots effortlessly, helping you diagnose bottlenecks and uncover performance hiccups.

Its clean web UI lets you visualize traces, view dependency diagrams, and jump straight to problem areas with a trace ID.

🌟 Key Features

• Distributed tracing for tracking latency issues
  
• Service dependency analysis with clear diagrams
  
• Flexible data reporting via HTTP, Kafka, or gRPC
• Trace querying
• Trace visualization

➕ Pros

• Easy to set up and lightweight
  
• Visualizes trace data clearly with a user-friendly web UI
  
• Support for multiple storage backends (Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MySQL)
  
• Report data via HTTP, Kafka, gRPC, or RabbitMQ
• Easily deployable via JAR files, Docker, or Helm charts

➖ Cons

• Less polished UI compared to Grafana's tempo
• Hard to learn

💲 Pricing

Zipkin is completely free and open-source, making it a cost-effective choice for distributed tracing in microservices.

4. Datadog

Datadog is an all-in-one observability platform for distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and security. It tracks requests from front end to back end, helping you pinpoint performance issues effortlessly.

Datadog's trace explorer offers real-time trace analysis, correlating traces with logs and metrics for a complete system view.

🌟 Key Features

• Real user monitoring (RUM)
  
• Synthetic monitoring
  
• Distributed tracing
  
• Application performance monitoring (APM)
  
• Log management and security monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Control trace data volume by adjusting sampling rates and retention periods for specific spans
• Pre-built dashboards provide quick insights into application performance and latency issues
• Adjust tracing without code changes, offering flexibility in monitoring without redeployment
• Trace Explorer simplifies real-time analysis
• 800+ integrations with popular tools
  

➖ Cons

• Pricing can be steep

💲 Pricing

Datadog offers a free tier for five hosts with 1-day metric retention. Pro plan starts at $15 per host/month (billed annually).

5. Dynatrace

Dynatracecombines monitoring, security, and distributed tracing in one platform. With Smartscape, you get a live, dynamic map of your entire architecture for effortless dependency tracking.

And for powerful insights, Grail pulls together logs and analytics, giving you the clarity you need to solve issues faster.

In addition, Dynatrace's PurePath technology automatically handles end-to-end tracing, so you can skip the manual setup.

🌟 Key Features

• Distributed tracing
  
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
  
• Application security
• Log management
  

➕ Pros

• Timeseries and histogram charts display trace data trends, distributions, and anomalies
• Quick filtering with facets (key-value pairs) and the ability to group data by up to three attributes for focused analysis
• Offers real-time dependency mapping with Smartscape
• Flexible DQL-based filtering to refine trace data based on specific criteria
• Supports automated workflows for efficient incident management
  

➖ Cons

• Trace data retention limited to 10 days, which may be short for some use cases
• Costs can increase significantly with high data ingestion and retention needs

💲 Pricing

Pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $0.08 per hour for an 8 GiB host, and it covers full-stack monitoring for infrastructure, applications, and microservices

6. New Relic

New Relic has you covered with its robust distributed tracing and all-in-one observability tools. The trace explorer lets you search and visualize traces in real time, while infinite tracing captures every single trace and filters out the noise later, ensuring you never miss crucial data.

🌟 Key Features

• Real-time trace explorer
  
• Application and infrastructure monitoring
• Infinite tracing with tail-based sampling
  
• Real user and synthetic monitoring
  
• Log management
  
• Mobile and browser monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Intuitive interface for navigating, filtering, and analyzing traces
• Logs-in-context links logs, traces, and metrics for faster troubleshooting
• Infinite tracing captures the most important data, ensuring you don’t miss critical traces
• Multiple ways to filter traces and spans to quickly pinpoint issues
• Scatter plots help quickly identify outlying traces and anomalies
  

➖ Cons

• Requires familiarity with NRQL for advanced querying and analysis
• Can't be self-hosted like Grafana Tempo

💲 Pricing

New Relic’s free plan offers one user 100 GB of data ingestion and full platform access. After that, it’s $0.30 per GB with a pay-as-you-go model.

7. Splunk

Splunk offers top-tier tracing and analytics. Splunk’s dynamic service maps provide a real-time view of your service dependencies and latencies, making it a breeze to spot bottlenecks and errors. No more guesswork – just clear visualizations.

With log management, infrastructure monitoring, and even a network explorer, Splunk gives you full visibility into your system’s health and performance in one unified platform.

🌟 Key Features

• Distributed tracing and APM
  
• Real user and synthetic monitoring
  
• Dynamic service maps for dependency tracking
  
• Network explorer for cloud network performance
  
• Log management and infrastructure monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Dynamic service maps give you an intuitive, real-time view of service dependencies.
  
• Clean and intuitive UI for simplified monitoring.
  
• The tag spotlight feature lets you drill into latency spikes and errors with precision
• Service maps and detailed trace visualizations make it easy to understand complex interactions
  

➖ Cons

• Initial setup and configuration can be challenging

💲 Pricing

Splunk pricing starts at $15/month per host for infrastructure monitoring, $55/month per host for APM, and $75/month per host for full observability.

8. Honeycomb

Honeycomb offers a dynamic and intuitive approach to distributed tracing. Honeycomb’s unique feature, BubbleUp, automatically surfaces anomalies and pinpoints exactly what’s causing them — saving you the hassle of sifting through endless data.

🌟 Key Features

• Service maps
• Distributed tracing
• BubbleUp anomaly detection
  
• Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
  

➕ Pros

• Combines logs, metrics, and traces in a cohesive workflow.
  
• BubbleUp quickly highlights anomalies, cutting down troubleshooting time.
  
• Dynamic views help identify patterns and anomalies from different angles
  

➖ Cons

• Costs can increase with higher data ingestion rates.
  

💲 Pricing

Honeycomb’s free plan includes 20 million monthly events. The pro plan starts at $130/month for 100 million events, scaling up to 1.5 billion events.

9. Elastic Cloud

Elastic Cloud is an observability platform with distributed tracing, built by the creators of the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. It seamlessly combines tracing, logs, metrics, and profiling in one place.

With Elastic Cloud, you can easily track requests across microservices, quickly identifying bottlenecks, latency issues, and errors.

It supports the W3C Trace Context standard for smooth trace propagation and features an intuitive APM interface that makes exploring trace data simple and even enjoyable.

🌟 Key Features

• Real user monitoring
• Distributed tracing
• Synthetic monitoring
  
• Cross-cluster search

➕ Pros

• Span compression for optimizing trace data
  
• Advanced search makes finding trace data super fast
  
• Option to self-host for full control
  
• Backed by a massive open-source community for support
  
• User-friendly dashboards for visualizing complex traces
  

➖ Cons

• Can be a bit overwhelming if you're new to the Elastic Stack
  
• Costs can grow quickly as data volume increases
  

💲 Pricing

The standard plan starts at $95/month, giving you core Elastic tools and basic security. Need more? The gold plan is $109/month with business-hours support and alerting.

10. Logz.io

Logz.io integrates Jaeger, Prometheus, and Grafana into one cohesive system, simplifying distributed tracing, log management, and monitoring.

Logz.io’s distributed tracing lets you track requests across your microservices, making it easy to spot bottlenecks and latency issues.

Service maps visualize how your services interact while correlating logs, metrics, and traces, giving you a complete view of system health.

🌟 Key Features

• Distributed tracing with Jaeger integration
  
• Log management and infrastructure monitoring
  
• Deployment tracking
• Service maps for dependency visualization
  
• Real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Clear service maps simplify dependency tracking
• User-friendly interface for managing complex observability tasks
• Combines Jaeger, Prometheus, and Grafana in one platform
  
• Kubernetes 360 for contextual tracing within Kubernetes clusters

➖ Cons

• Steeper learning curve when managing multiple tools and configurations.
  

💲 Pricing

Logz.io offers flexible pricing based on data volume. Log management starts at $0.90 per GB, with metrics and tracing plans beginning around 29/month.

Final thoughts

Choosing the best distributed tracing and observability tool depends on your needs and priorities. If you’re still undecided, use a free plan to experiment with each option and see which fits best.

Don’t limit yourself to tracing tools — prioritize platforms offering additional observability features like log management, metrics, and alerting to streamline your workflow and simplify troubleshooting.

Article by

Stanley Ulili

Stanley Ulili is a technical educator at Better Stack based in Malawi. He specializes in backend development and has freelanced for platforms like DigitalOcean, LogRocket, and AppSignal. Stanley is passionate about making complex topics accessible to developers.

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