Tempo vs Zipkin: Key Differences & When to Use Each

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

Key Differences

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

Feature

Tempo

Monitoring

Zipkin

Monitoring

Side-by-side comparison of developer tools
Distributed tracing backend
Distributed tracing system
GitHub Stars
⭐ 5,232
⭐ 17,435
Contributors
👥 299
👥 142
Pricing
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
Languages
Go
Java
Features
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Grafana
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Observability
  • • Openzipkin
  • • Tracing
  • • Zipkin
Integrations
  • • grafana
No integrations listed
Momentum Score
89/100 (slowing)
33/100 (stable)
Community Health
30/100 (needs-attention)
17/100 (needs-attention)
Maturity Index
20/100 (experimental)
28/100 (experimental)
Innovation Score
13/100 (traditional)
34/100 (traditional)
Risk Score (higher is safer)
29/100 (high)
22/100 (high)
Developer Experience
16/100 (poor)
36/100 (poor)
Links
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub

Tempo Strengths

  • ✓ Larger community (299 contributors)

Zipkin Strengths

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

When to Use Tempo vs Zipkin

Use Tempo 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

Tempo vs Grafana → Zipkin vs Grafana → Tempo vs Prometheus → Zipkin vs Prometheus → Tempo vs Loki → Zipkin vs Loki → Tempo vs Jaeger → Zipkin vs Jaeger → Tempo vs VictoriaMetrics → Zipkin vs VictoriaMetrics → Tempo vs Thanos → Zipkin vs Thanos →

More Comparisons

View Tempo → View Zipkin → Search More Tools →

Data source: GitHub API

Last updated: 5/5/2026