Top 10 Jaeger Alternatives 2024

You might already be using Jaeger for distributed tracing, but maybe you're wondering if other options exist. While Jaeger is free to use, it can cost you time and effort when it comes to setting it up, managing dependencies, and hosting it. Sometimes, you just want a solution that works out of the box.

In this article, we've gathered the top ten alternatives to Jaeger.

Jaeger key features

Let's take a moment to recap some of the features Jaeger offers:

• Tracks requests across services, preserving context for seamless monitoring
• Enables real-time detection of performance bottlenecks and anomalies
• Supports root cause analysis with detailed trace information
• Visualizes service dependencies to clarify architecture
• Provides insights to optimize performance and reduce latency

Jaeger cons

If everything worked perfectly, you probably wouldn’t be looking for alternatives, right? Here are a few challenges you might encounter:

• Setting up and configuring Jaeger can be complex, especially when managing hosting and infrastructure.
• There's no dedicated customer support—if something goes wrong, you're largely on your own.

Jaeger pricing

One of Jaeger’s most significant advantages is its open-source and free use. While you won’t need to spend money on the software itself, you'll still face hosting costs for backends like Elasticsearch or Cassandra. Configuring and scaling these tools to meet your infrastructure’s needs can take significant time and effort.

The top 10 Jaeger alternatives for 2024

Below is an overview of the top ten tools that offer features like distributed tracing, logs, metrics, real user monitoring, error tracking, etc. Compare their key features, strengths, and pricing models to find the best fit for your needs:

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is quickly becoming a go-to for complete observability, offering a user-friendly platform with powerful monitoring tools. Its clean, intuitive interface that doesn’t overwhelm with complexity makes it stand out. While distributed tracing is still in the works (coming soon!), Better Stack already shines in centralizing your logs and metrics seamlessly.

The platform automatically parses logs into structured formats like JSON, making them easy to query with ClickHouse SQL. Not familiar with SQL? No problem—there’s a super-simple query builder that takes the guesswork out of it. With reliable monitoring, your servers are pinged every 30 seconds from multiple global locations, giving you accurate, real-time insights. If something goes wrong, you’ll receive detailed alerts through email, SMS, or phone—even with screenshots or error details—so you can resolve issues swiftly.

Whether you’re managing web apps, APIs, containers, or cron jobs, Better Stack ensures everything stays online, and its incident management tools keep your team coordinated during outages.

🌟 Key features

• Real-time infrastructure
• uptime monitoring
• Customizable status pages
• Incident management
• Log management

➕ Pros

• Intuitive, pre-built dashboards make data easy to understand
• ClickHouse SQL and no-code query options make log analysis accessible for everyone
• Very cost-effective with flexible pricing
• Excellent collaboration features to resolve incidents faster
• Custom status pages to keep users informed during outages
• Seamless integration with tools like Slack, AWS, and Datadog

➖ Cons

• Distributed tracing isn’t available yet—but it’s on the way!

💲 Pricing

Better Stack offers a generous free plan with 10 monitors, 3 GB of log retention, and a status page. For more advanced needs, the pay-as-you-go plan starts at $29/month, giving you up to 30 GB of logs, unlimited alerts via phone and SMS, and advanced incident management features. For enterprise-level requirements, they offer premium support, AI-driven insights, and custom solutions to help you scale confidently.

Curious about more details? Check out the pricing page for all the info.

2. Datadog

Datadog is a powerful observability platform that combines unified visibility into your applications, infrastructure, logs, and security. It is a compelling alternative to Jaeger.

Datadog’s distributed tracing offers real-time, full-stack insights, allowing you to follow every request from front-end user interactions to back-end services. This makes it easy to spot bottlenecks and troubleshoot performance issues efficiently. The trace explorer is an invaluable tool that lets you search and analyze traces in real-time, correlating them with metrics and logs to get a complete picture of any issues.

One of Datadog’s strengths is its control over trace ingestion, with customizable sampling and retention filters that help manage what to keep and optimize costs. It also integrates smoothly with OpenTelemetry, real user monitoring, and synthetic monitoring, offering a well-rounded solution for enhancing performance and user experience.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed tracing
• Application performance monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Profiling and log management
• Network and security monitoring
• Real user monitoring

➕ Pros

• The trace explorer makes real-time querying easy, helping you quickly track and resolve performance issues
• Customizable sampling and retention filters manage trace volume and costs efficiently
• Combines metrics, traces, logs, and security monitoring in one unified platform
• Customer support to help you when stuck
• User-friendly interface and visualizations make handling complex environments simpler
• Security monitoring detects and mitigates vulnerabilities across your systems
• Extensive integrations with over 750 tools and services

➖ Cons

• Pricing can escalate based on data volume and services used, and billing can sometimes be unclear.
• The sheer number of features can feel overwhelming for some users.

💲 Pricing

Datadog offers a free tier for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention and core tools. The pro plan starts at $15 per host per month (billed annually), which includes over 400 integrations, 15-month metric retention, and container monitoring. For larger teams, the enterprise plan starts at $23 per host per month, featuring advanced capabilities like AI-powered alerts and live process monitoring for more sophisticated needs.

3. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is another great alternative to Jaeger that offers monitoring, security, and distributed tracing all in one. A patented PurePath technology is one of Dynatrace's impressive features, which provides end-to-end visibility across your entire stack, whether your applications run on traditional infrastructure, cloud-native environments, or serverless architectures. PurePath works automatically without code changes or complicated setups, making starting easy.

Dynatrace PurePath also delivers deep diagnostics, helping you quickly understand the performance of your systems. Whether you need a high-level overview or want to drill into specific transactions and logs, Dynatrace makes it easy to navigate through your data.

Dynatrace also offers Smartscape, a real-time map of your application architecture. It automatically maps out applications, services, processes, hosts, and data centers—providing a dynamic, up-to-date view of your environment. Meanwhile, Dynatrace’s Grail technology consolidates log management and analytics, seamlessly giving you valuable insights from your data.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed tracing
• Cloud and infrastructure monitoring
  
• Application security monitoring
• Log management
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Digital experience monitoring

➕ Pros

• Smartscape’s dynamic map simplifies dependency tracking and troubleshooting.
• OneAgent automates logs, metrics, and trace collection with minimal setup.
• Combines monitoring, security, and analytics in one platform for complex environments.
• Supports modern architectures like cloud-native, serverless, and service mesh.
• Davis AI speeds up root cause analysis, reducing troubleshooting time.

➖ Cons

• Can be expensive, especially as your environment scales.
• The extensive feature set can be overwhelming for new users.

💲 Pricing

Dynatrace offers flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing tailored to your organization’s needs. Full-stack monitoring costs $0.08 per hour for an 8 GiB host, giving you complete visibility across applications, infrastructure, and microservices. Infrastructure monitoring is available at $0.04 per hour for any host size for more specific needs. Services like Kubernetes monitoring, log management, and application security are priced separately, ensuring you only pay for the features you use. This flexible pricing model grows with you, offering both clarity and scalability.

4. New Relic

New Relic is another alternative to Jaeger, which can help you monitor and manage all your telemetry data across distributed systems. Its distributed tracing feature lets you follow requests as they flow through various services, making it easy to pinpoint performance issues and trace errors down to individual spans.

It has helpful features like infinite tracing, which uses tail-based sampling to capture and store only the most relevant traces. Unlike traditional head-based sampling, which can miss important data, New Relic collects everything first and then filters for the most critical traces. This approach offers greater accuracy without overwhelming your storage.

The trace explorer gives you real-time access to trace data, allowing you to search and visualize complex traces quickly. With seamless integration with OpenTelemetry, New Relic makes gathering and unifying data from different sources simple—perfect for microservices, serverless functions, and traditional applications.

But tracing is just the beginning. New Relic also provides a full suite of observability tools, including log management, security monitoring, and performance monitoring for applications and infrastructure.

🌟 Key features

• Digital experience monitoring
• Log management
• Application performance monitoring
• Mobile monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Security monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Browser monitoring

➕ Pros

• Infinite tracing ensures you keep only the most important traces, optimizing data storage.
• OpenTelemetry integration makes instrumentation across different systems flexible and smooth.
• The logs-in-context feature correlates logs with traces and metrics, making troubleshooting more effective.
• Custom dashboards and NRQL (New Relic Query Language) provide advanced control over your data analysis.
• Quick and easy setup, even for teams with limited DevOps experience.

➖ Cons

• Costs can add up quickly due to data ingestion fees and per-user pricing.
• NRQL can be hard to learn

💲 Pricing

New Relic’s free plan offers 100 GB of data ingestion per month and full platform access for one user. If you have a lot of data, pricing starts at $0.30 per GB with a pay-as-you-go model. Pro and enterprise plans are available for advanced features, enhanced security, more user seats, and priority support, ideal for larger teams.

5. Splunk

Splunk is another solid alternative to Jaeger, offering distributed tracing and real-time monitoring for applications, networks, and infrastructure. With Splunk’s distributed tracing, you can follow how requests flow through different services, allowing you to collect and analyze spans, identify performance bottlenecks, and optimize your system's overall efficiency.

Supporting OpenTelemetry, Splunk makes it easy to instrument applications across different languages and platforms. It also offers features like the dynamic service map, which visually lays out service dependencies and latencies, making detecting and troubleshooting errors in real time easier. The tag spotlight feature helps you correlate errors or latency spikes with the right context, giving you a more detailed understanding of your services' behavior.

Splunk’s network explorer goes a step further, providing an in-depth view of your cloud network’s performance, making it simpler to diagnose network-related issues. This multi-dimensional observability approach allows you to monitor everything—from application performance to infrastructure health—in one unified platform.

🌟 Key features

• Application performance monitoring
  
• Log management
  
• Infrastructure monitoring
  
• Real user monitoring
  
• Synthetic API monitoring
  
• Network explorer
  
• Browser monitoring
  
• Synthetic uptime monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• The dynamic service map gives you a real-time, intuitive view of service dependencies, making detecting and resolving errors easier.
  
• OpenTelemetry integration offers flexible and seamless instrumentation across various environments.
  
• Splunk brings together logs, metrics, and traces in one platform, giving you complete visibility over your system.
  

➖ Cons

• The learning curve for mastering Splunk’s query language (SPL) can be quite steep.
  
• While powerful, Splunk’s data manipulation tools, like props and transforms, can be rigid and challenging to use.
  

💲 Pricing

Splunk offers flexible pricing to fit different needs. Infrastructure monitoring is available at $15 per month per host, while full observability costs $75 per host. Application performance monitoring costs $55 per host; real user monitoring is available for $14 per 10,000 sessions. Splunk also provides standard and premium plans with pricing models based on workload, entities, or data ingestion, so you can choose the option that best fits your needs.

6. Honeycomb

Another excellent alternative to Jaeger is Honeycomb, which offers a unique approach to distributed tracing by making traces central to debugging and performance monitoring. While many platforms treat traces as supplementary to logs and metrics, Honeycomb integrates them into a unified workflow, giving you a more cohesive view of system behavior and user interactions. Its tracing feature stitches together events, allowing teams to track the flow of operations, quickly identify issues, and optimize performance.

Honeycomb’s standout tool, BubbleUp, automatically detects anomalies and pinpoints the exact factors causing problematic user experiences. Seamless integration with OpenTelemetry makes gathering and analyzing telemetry data easy without requiring major changes to your instrumentation setup.

🌟 Key features

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

➕ Pros

• BubbleUp automatically highlights anomalies, reducing manual troubleshooting.
• Integrates smoothly with OpenTelemetry, enabling vendor-agnostic instrumentation.
• Combines logs, metrics, and traces in one streamlined workflow for greater insight.
• Event-based tracing offers deep visibility into user interactions and system behavior.

➖ Cons

• Costs can rise quickly with higher data ingestion rates.

💲 Pricing

Honeycomb offers a free plan with up to 20 million monthly events. The pro plan starts at $130/month for 100 million events, with up to 1.5 billion scalability options. This plan also includes advanced features like SLOs and premium support. Custom pricing options are available for larger teams with specific needs.

7. Logz.io

Logz.io is a platform to consider, especially if you love working with open-source technologies. It combines popular tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger into a cohesive, user-friendly experience, helping you easily manage, monitor, and troubleshoot your applications.

Logz.io’s distributed tracing feature offers profound insights into the performance of microservices, allowing you to trace requests as they pass through multiple services. This simplifies pinpointing performance bottlenecks and identifying root causes of latency.

Advanced features like service maps help visualize service dependencies, and the ability to correlate logs and metrics with traces gives you a complete view of your system’s health. Real-time alerts and deployment tracking ensure you can respond quickly to performance issues while seeing the impact of any changes made.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed tracing
  
• Service maps
  
• Service overview
  
• Log management
  
• Infrastructure monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Seamless integration with OpenTelemetry for easy setup and instrumentation.
• Combines the power of open-source tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger in one platform.
• Clear service maps and dependency visualizations improve insight into service interactions.
• User-friendly interface simplifies managing complex observability tasks.
• Kubernetes 360 lets you search spans within the context of Kubernetes infrastructure.

➖ Cons

• The learning curve can be steep when working across multiple tools and configurations.

💲 Pricing

Logz.io offers flexible pricing based on data volume and services, with a 14-day free trial to explore the platform. Log management starts at $0.90 per GB, while metrics and tracing services come with custom plans starting around $29 per month. Enterprise plans provide more flexibility, including advanced alerts, longer data retention, and enhanced support.

8. Elastic Cloud

Elastic Cloud is a managed service powered by the creators of the Elastic Stack—Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. It provides a full suite of observability tools, integrating logs, metrics, traces, and profiling into one platform to give you a complete view of your system's health and performance.

With Elastic Cloud’s distributed tracing, you can track requests across microservices. This helps you identify performance bottlenecks, trace latency issues, and find errors, even in the most complex architectures. Elastic Cloud adheres to the W3C Trace Context standard, ensuring smooth trace propagation between services. The intuitive APM interface allows you to dive deep into trace data, pinpoint performance issues, and get insights on how to fix them.

Elastic Cloud also supports OpenTelemetry, simplifying instrumentation and making it easy to collect rich trace data without the hassle of manual configuration. Paired with real user monitoring, the platform gives you actionable insights into user behavior and interactions, helping to enhance both user experience and system reliability.

🌟 Key features

• Cross-cluster search
  
• Span compression
  
• Integration with Jaeger
  
• Data security
  
• Distributed tracing
  
• Infrastructure monitoring
  
• Transaction sampling
  
• Real user monitoring
  
• Synthetic monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Backed by a large open-source community for robust support
  
• Built on trusted open-source tools like Elasticsearch and Kibana
  
• Advanced search capabilities make data retrieval fast and efficient
  
• Option to self-host Elastic Stack tools for more control
  
• User-friendly interface for visualizing performance and tracing requests
  
• Span compression optimizes trace data for better performance
  
• Full support for the W3C Trace Context standard and OpenTelemetry, making cross-environment instrumentation simple
  

➖ Cons

• It can be a bit complex to familiarize yourself with the tools it offers
• Costs can increase quickly as your data volume grows
  

💲 Pricing

Elastic Cloud offers flexible pricing to suit different needs. The standard plan starts at $95/month and includes access to core Elastic Stack tools, basic security, and Kibana. The gold plan is available for $109/month, with business-hours support for additional features like reporting and alerting.

The platinum plan costs $125/month for more advanced features, providing enhanced security, machine learning, and 24/7 support. Starting at $175/month is the enterprise plan, offering premium support, extended data retention, and advanced machine learning capabilities.

9. Coralogix

Coralogix is a good alternative to Jaeger, offering a comprehensive observability platform that centralizes the management of logs, metrics, and traces.

Coralogix’s distributed tracing feature helps you visualize interactions across different services, offering powerful representations of data. You can easily link traces to logs for a complete view of any issue, all in one place. With various visualization options like Gantt charts and flame views, Coralogix offers flexible ways to dive deeper into your trace data and understand system behavior.

The platform also offers advanced filtering and query tools, making it easy to sift through traces and spans, helping teams resolve issues faster and more efficiently.

🌟 Key features

• Application performance monitoring
  
• Synthetic monitoring
  
• Log and metrics management
  
• Real user monitoring
  
• Alerting
  
• Advanced filtering and querying for traces and spans
  

➕ Pros

• Efficient trace analysis with powerful filtering and query options
  
• Instantly access historical data from S3 archives without rehydration or reindexing
  
• Seamlessly integrates with open-source tools like PromQL, Lucene, and Grafana
  
• Cost-effective processing through first-pass analysis in Kafka Streams
  

➖ Cons

• Documentation can be lacking at times
  

💲 Pricing

Coralogix offers flexible, usage-based pricing that gives you control over your data and costs. Here’s a breakdown:

• Frequent searches: $1.15 per GB
  
• Monitoring: $0.50 per GB
  
• Compliance storage: $0.17 per GB
  
• Metrics and tracing: Based on data ingestion volume
  
• TCO Optimizer: Helps estimate and optimize costs
  
• Free trial: Available for new users to explore the platform
  
• Custom plans: Tailored options for larger deployments or specialized needs

10. Bugsnag

Last on the list is Bugsnag, an observability platform focused on error and performance monitoring for web, mobile, and server-side applications. With its distributed tracing feature, Bugsnag helps you identify performance issues and track errors across complex microservices architectures, offering clear insights to resolve bottlenecks.

Bugsnag integrates effortlessly with OpenTelemetry, giving you control over your telemetry data and allowing you to track traces and logs side by side. This makes it easy to uncover root causes without constantly switching between tools. Bugsnag’s visual tools break down OpenTelemetry data efficiently, allowing you to zoom in on specific details easily.

A key cost-effective feature is remote sampling, which helps reduce telemetry data costs as your system scales. Combined with intuitive trace filtering and search capabilities, Bugsnag simplifies tracking down specific performance issues. Its stability metrics also provide ongoing insights into your app’s overall health, informing your team of potential risks.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed tracing
• Trace filtering and segmentation for deep analysis
  
• Error monitoring
• App stability tracking
  
• Real user monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Stability scores offer clear visibility into app performance
  
• Correlates logs and traces side by side, simplifying root cause analysis
  
• Remote sampling efficiently reduces telemetry costs as your app scales
  

➖ Cons

• Documentation can be tricky to navigate at times
  

💲 Pricing

Bugsnag offers a free plan with 7.5K events and 1M monthly spans, making it ideal for smaller teams or initial testing. Paid plans start at $20/month, covering 50,000 events and 1M spans, while the preferred plan, designed for larger teams needing advanced features like error prioritization and custom notifications, starts at $33/month. Enterprise options are available with custom pricing for large-scale, high-volume use cases.

Final thoughts

Choosing the right tool depends on your specific needs. This article explored several alternatives to Jaeger, offering distributed tracing along with advanced features like log management, metrics, real user monitoring, and error tracking. Whether you opt for our platform or another, we encourage you to explore the free trials or versions available to find the best fit for your observability needs.

Article by

Stanley Ulili

Stanley is a freelance web developer and researcher from Malawi. He loves learning new things and writing about them to understand and solidify concepts. He hopes that by sharing his experience, others can learn something from them too!

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