New Relic vs Zipkin: Key Differences & When to Use Each

Comprehensive side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, and metrics

Key Differences

Compare New Relic and Zipkin across features, pricing, integrations, and community metrics. New Relic / Zipkin.

Feature

New Relic

Monitoring

Zipkin

Monitoring

Side-by-side comparison of developer tools
New Relic APM agent for Ruby applications
Distributed tracing system
GitHub Stars
⭐ 1,207
⭐ 17,435
Contributors
👥 305
👥 142
Pricing
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
Languages
Ruby
Java
Features
  • • Agent
  • • Apm Agent
  • • Hacktoberfest
  • • Ruby
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Observability
  • • Openzipkin
  • • Tracing
  • • Zipkin
Integrations
No integrations listed
No integrations listed
Momentum Score
19/100 (stable)
33/100 (stable)
Community Health
19/100 (needs-attention)
17/100 (needs-attention)
Maturity Index
15/100 (experimental)
28/100 (experimental)
Innovation Score
16/100 (traditional)
34/100 (traditional)
Risk Score (higher is safer)
29/100 (high)
22/100 (high)
Developer Experience
18/100 (poor)
36/100 (poor)
Links
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub

New Relic Strengths

  • ✓ Larger community (305 contributors)

Zipkin Strengths

  • ✓ More popular (17,435 stars)
  • ✓ More features (5 listed)

When to Use New Relic vs Zipkin

Use New Relic when its strengths align better with your stack and team needs, and choose Zipkin when its ecosystem, integrations, or cost profile is a better fit.

Related comparisons

New Relic vs Grafana → Zipkin vs Grafana → New Relic vs Prometheus → Zipkin vs Prometheus → New Relic vs Loki → Zipkin vs Loki → New Relic vs Jaeger → Zipkin vs Jaeger → New Relic vs VictoriaMetrics → Zipkin vs VictoriaMetrics → New Relic vs Thanos → Zipkin vs Thanos →

More Comparisons

View New Relic → View Zipkin → Search More Tools →

Data source: GitHub API

Last updated: 5/5/2026