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
⭐ 5,545
⭐ 17,471
Contributors
👥 318
👥 142
Pricing
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
Languages
Go
Java
Features
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Grafana
  • • Tempo
  • • Traces
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Observability
  • • Openzipkin
  • • Tracing
  • • Zipkin
Integrations
  • • grafana
No integrations listed
Momentum Score
79/100 (slowing)
21/100 (stable)
Community Health
33/100 (needs-attention)
18/100 (needs-attention)
Maturity Index
21/100 (experimental)
28/100 (experimental)
Innovation Score
22/100 (traditional)
34/100 (traditional)
Risk Score (higher is safer)
35/100 (medium)
23/100 (high)
Developer Experience
22/100 (poor)
37/100 (poor)
Links
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub

Tempo Strengths

  • ✓ Larger community (318 contributors)

Zipkin Strengths

  • ✓ More popular (17,471 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

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More Comparisons

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Data source: GitHub API

Last updated: 10/25/2026