Jaeger is a CNCF-graduated distributed tracing platform for monitoring and troubleshooting requests across microservices.
23.4K+25 this week3.2KGoApache-2.0Updated 3 hours ago
3 alternatives
3 best open-source alternatives to Datadog APM (2026)
Looking for a free, open-source alternative to Datadog APM? These 3 projects can replace it. Each one passed our quality screening and is explained in plain words, so you can compare stars, license and maintenance at a glance.
How to choose
Decide first what job you need done: running your own tracing backend to follow requests and latency across services, or just instrumenting an app for a service you already use. Jaeger and Zipkin are both distributed tracing systems you can host yourself; Jaeger focuses on monitoring and troubleshooting requests across microservices, while Zipkin focuses on collecting and querying timing data to track down latency. newrelic/go-agent is different: it is a Go SDK that sends data to New Relic, so it is an instrumentation library rather than a backend you run.
- jaegerBest for teams that want to run their own tracing platform to monitor and troubleshoot requests across microservices.
- zipkinBest for developers whose main goal is collecting and querying timing data to track down latency across their services.
- go-agentBest for Go teams already using New Relic who need to instrument their apps and send transactions, errors, and runtime metrics to it.
Quick comparison
| Project | Stars | License | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|
| jaegertracing/jaeger | ★ 23.4K | Apache-2.0 | 3 hours ago |
| openzipkin/zipkin | ★ 17.5K | Apache-2.0 | 3 months ago |
| newrelic/go-agent | ★ 839 | Apache-2.0 | yesterday |
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system that collects and queries timing data to troubleshoot latency across service architectures.
17.5K3.1KJavaApache-2.0Updated 3 months ago
Go SDK for instrumenting Go applications and sending transactions, errors, and runtime metrics to New Relic.
839319GoApache-2.0Well maintainedUpdated yesterday
FAQ
- Is there a free, open-source alternative to Datadog APM?
- Yes. The most popular open-source alternatives to Datadog APM on Repolode are jaeger, zipkin, go-agent.
- Which Datadog APM alternative should I choose?
- jaeger has the most GitHub stars and is released under Apache-2.0. Compare the license and last commit of each option in the table above before choosing.
How this list is made: AI reads each project's documentation to match it with products it can replace, every project passes our quality screening, and the list is ranked by GitHub stars. Stars updated Nov 7, 2026. How Repolode works