Top 10 Zipkin Alternatives 2024

For some, Zipkin is the default choice for distributed tracing, and they might not have explored other options. But, the world of tracing tools offers a variety of alternatives to Zipkin.

Each tool brings advantages like enhanced scalability, user-friendly interfaces, richer integrations, and innovative features.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to 10 top alternatives to Zipkin.

Zipkin key features

Zipkin collects timing data to troubleshoot latency issues in distributed systems with minimal setup. It goes beyond simple error logging by providing detailed trace lookups and comprehensive queries, allowing you to trace the sequence of service calls, user actions, and events that cause issues.

The Zipkin UI features a dependency diagram that visualizes request flows, helping identify error paths and deprecated service calls for easier optimization.

Zipkin is free and open-source, meaning you can deploy it anywhere you choose. But we both know “free” often comes with hidden complexities — scaling, maintaining, and managing it can quickly become burdensome.

The top Zipkin alternatives in 2024

If Zipkin has been your go-to for distributed tracing, it's worth exploring other tools that offer more scalability, integrations, and advanced features. Here's a comparison of some of the best Zipkin alternatives to help you find the right fit for your observability needs:

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a modern observability platform that combines log management, metrics tracking, and real-time alerting in one sleek package.

While distributed tracing isn’t available yet, Better Stack shines in simplifying incident management and uptime monitoring — areas where Zipkin falls short.

Better Stack’s intuitive interface and alerting system ensure you’re always on top of issues.

🌟 Key features

• Log management
• Incident management
• Uptime monitoring
• Customizable status pages
  
• Infrastructure monitoring

➕ Pros

• Combines logs, metrics, and incident management in one tool
  
• Intuitive, user-friendly interface for easy monitoring
  
• Robust alerting system with phone, SMS, and email notifications
  
• Simplifies troubleshooting beyond just tracing capabilities
  

➖ Cons

• Distributed tracing is still under development.
  

💲 Pricing

Better Stack offers a free plan with 10 monitors, 3 GB of log retention, and a status page. The pay-as-you-go plan starts at $29/month, providing 30 GB of logs, unlimited alerts, and advanced incident management.

2. Jaeger

Jaeger is a robust, open-source distributed tracing tool. Like Zipkin, Jaeger helps you troubleshoot latency, identify bottlenecks, and analyze service dependencies.

However, Jaeger offers more advanced features like adaptive sampling and better scalability for large microservice deployments.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed context propagation
• Transaction monitoring
  
• Adaptive sampling
  
• Service dependency analysis

➕ Pros

• High scalability, thanks to adaptive sampling
  
• Advanced visualization with detailed dependency graphs
  
• Strong community support and active development
• Supports storage backends like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and Kafka
  

➖ Cons

• More complex setup and infrastructure requirements compared to Zipkin.
  

💲 Pricing

Jaeger is 100% free and open-source, making it a cost-effective solution if you need scalable distributed tracing without licensing fees.

3. Datadog

Datadog is a feature-packed observability platform that offers distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and security — all in one sleek package.

Datadog provides real-time trace analysis and correlates traces with logs and metrics, giving you a complete, unified view of your system’s health and performance.

🌟 Key features

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

➕ Pros

• User-friendly interface with powerful visualizations
• Provides trace requests from browser and mobile applications through backend services and databases
• Over 800 integrations with popular tools and services
  
• Trace Explorer simplifies real-time querying and issue resolution
  

➖ Cons

• Pricing can escalate quickly with high data volumes
  
• The extensive feature set can be overwhelming, especially if you're accustomed to Zipkin's simplicity

💲 Pricing

Datadog offers a free tier for up to 5 hosts with core tools and 1-day metric retention. The pro plan starts at $15 per host/month (billed annually), offering 400+ integrations, 15-month metric retention, and container monitoring.

4. New Relic

New Relic is another option with better distributed tracing tools. New Relic captures all traces first and filters out the noise later with infinite tracing, ensuring you keep only the most relevant data.

New Relic's trace explorer makes it easy to search and visualize traces in real-time. But New Relic doesn’t stop at tracing. It offers everything from real user monitoring to synthetic monitoring, giving you full visibility into your systems.

🌟 Key features

• Application and infrastructure monitoring
  
• Infinite tracing
  
• Performance monitoring
  
• Log management
• Real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring
  
• Mobile and browser monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Logs-in-context links logs, traces, and metrics for faster troubleshooting
  
• Infinite tracing captures the most important data without overwhelming storage
  
• Custom dashboards and NRQL give advanced control over data analysis
  

➖ Cons

• Costs can rise quickly with data ingestion fees
• NRQL has a learning curve for new users
  

💲 Pricing

New Relic’s free plan includes 100 GB of data ingestion and full platform access for one user. Beyond that, pricing starts at $0.30 per GB with a pay-as-you-go model.

5. Honeycomb

Honeycomb offers a refreshing and modern approach to distributed tracing. Unlike other platforms that treat traces as an afterthought, Honeycomb puts them front and center, making debugging and performance monitoring more cohesive and intuitive.

With Honeycomb, you can stitch events together effortlessly to track the flow of operations, identify issues quickly, and fine-tune performance.

The standout feature, BubbleUp, automatically detects anomalies and pinpoints the exact factors causing issues.

🌟 Key features

• Log management
• Distributed tracing
  
• Service maps
  
• Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
  

➕ Pros

• Combines logs, metrics, and traces in a unified workflow
  
• BubbleUp highlights anomalies automatically, cutting down on manual work
  
• Event-based tracing for deep insights into user interactions and system behavior
  
• Wide events provide detailed insights that go beyond traditional metrics

➖ Cons

• The wide-event model and advanced features may take time to learn

💲 Pricing

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

6. Logz.io

If you love open-source tools but want them in a sleek, cohesive platform, Logz.io is a great option. It blends Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger into one user-friendly experience, making distributed tracing, monitoring, and troubleshooting a breeze.

Logz.io’s tracing feature helps you track requests through your microservices, making pinpointing bottlenecks and latency issues easy.

Plus, its service maps provide straightforward, intuitive visualizations of your service dependencies, helping you understand how everything connects at a glance.

🌟 Key features

• Service overviews
  
• Distributed tracing
  
• Log management
  
• Infrastructure monitoring
  
• Service maps for visualizing dependencies
  

➕ Pros

• User-friendly interface for simplified observability
• Minimal configuration needed with auto-discovery
  
• Combines Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger into one powerful platform
• Multi-region, multi-cloud support for flexible deployment options
• Clear service maps to visualize dependencies and interactions
  
• Offers Kubernetes 360 for tracing spans within Kubernetes infrastructure
  

➖ Cons

• Steep learning curve when managing multiple tools and configurations
  

💲 Pricing

Logz.io offers flexible pricing based on data volume. Metrics and tracing plans start at around $29/month. A 14-day free trial lets you explore the platform before committing.

7. Splunk

Splunk brings distributed tracing into an intuitive platform. Splunk’s dynamic service map visually lays out your service dependencies and latency, helping you easily spot bottlenecks and errors.

The tag spotlight feature lets you drill down into latency spikes and errors in context, so you know exactly what’s going wrong and why.

🌟 Key features

• Real user and synthetic monitoring
  
• Distributed tracing and APM
  
• Network explorer
• Log management and infrastructure monitoring
  
• Dynamic service maps

➕ Pros

• Dynamic service maps provide intuitive, real-time dependency views
  
• Highlights common factors in problematic traces, whether related to infrastructure, code, or business logic
  
• Intuitive dashboards simplify issue resolution
• Stores and analyzes 100% of traces, avoiding blind spots

➖ Cons

• Data manipulation tools can be rigid and complex

💲 Pricing

Splunk offers various pricing, with infrastructure monitoring at $15 per host per month, APM at $55 per host per month, and full observability at $75 per host per month.

8. Dynatrace

Dynatrace also takes observability to the next level by combining monitoring, security, and distributed tracing in a single platform.

It offers PurePath technology, which delivers automatic, end-to-end visibility across your entire stack.

Dynatrace’s Smartscape creates a real-time, dynamic map of your application architecture, making dependency tracking a breeze.

Need deeper diagnostics? Grail technology consolidates log management and analytics, helping you quickly extract insights and troubleshoot issues.

🌟 Key features

• Automatic distributed tracing with PurePath Technology
• Synthetic and real user monitoring
• Application security monitoring
  
• Cloud and infrastructure monitoring
  
• Log management and analytics
  

➕ Pros

• Automatic instrumentation means there’s no need for manual tagging or configuration
• Smartscape simplifies dependency tracking and architecture visualization
  
• OneAgent automates trace, log, and metric collection with minimal setup
  
• Combines monitoring, security, and analytics in one platform
  
• Real-time application architecture mapping with Smartscape
  

➖ Cons

• Can be expensive as your infrastructure scales
  
• Continuous tracing and always-on profiling can impact system performance in some environments

💲 Pricing

Dynatrace offers flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing. Full-stack monitoring** starts at $0.08 per hour for an 8 GiB host, covering applications, infrastructure, and microservices.

9. Grafana Tempo

Grafana Tempo simplifies distributed tracing at scale while keeping costs low and infrastructure requirements minimal.

Unlike Zipkin, which relies on databases like Cassandra or Elasticsearch, Tempo uses object storage, making it a cost-efficient solution for handling high volumes of trace data.

🌟 Key Features

• Distributed tracing using object storage
  
• Trace discovery
• Targeted trace analysis with TraceQL

➕ Pros

• Cost-effective for high-volume tracing due to object storage
  
• Deep integration with the Grafana observability stack
  
• Supports multiple tracing standards for flexibility
  
• Low maintenance compared to Zipkin's database-backed approach
  

➖ Cons

• A newer tool with a smaller community compared to Zipkin
  
• Limited advanced features like dependency graphs and transaction filtering.
  

💲 Pricing

Grafana Tempo is 100% free and open-source. For a fully managed option, Grafana Cloud Traces offers a free tier with up to 50GB of traces, making it a budget-friendly solution for teams of all sizes.

10. Elastic Cloud

Elastic Cloud is an excellent tracing solution combining tracing, logs, metrics, and profiling into one unified platform.

Elastic Cloud’s distributed tracing lets you trace requests across microservices effortlessly, helping you quickly identify performance hiccups and latency issues.

Thanks to the W3C Trace Context standard, your traces flow smoothly between services, no matter how complex your setup.

🌟 Key Features

• W3C Trace Context support
  
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
  
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Advanced search with Elasticsearch for fast queries
  
• Combines everything into one cohesive platform — no extra tools needed
  
• Span compression ensures efficient trace data storage
  
• User-friendly APM interface makes tracing smooth and enjoyable
  

➖ Cons

• The Elastic Stack can feel overwhelming if you’re new to it
  
• It's expensive to use

💲 Pricing

Elastic Cloud’s pricing for the standard plan starts at $95/month, covering core Elastic tools and basic security. The gold plan at $109/month adds alerting and business-hours support.

Final thoughts

This article explored various alternatives to Zipkin that can improve your distributed tracing and observability workflows. We covered tools that offer both self-hosted and managed options, each bringing unique strengths and features.

If you're undecided on which tool to use, the best way to find the right fit is to try them out using free plans or demos. This hands-on experience will help you choose the best tool for your team's needs.

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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