Software Alternatives & Reviews

Apache SkyWalking VS Zipkin

Compare Apache SkyWalking VS Zipkin and see what are their differences

Apache SkyWalking logo Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source application performance monitoring solution that provides tracking, metrics analysis, service mesh observability, alarm, and visualization.

Zipkin logo Zipkin

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. 
  • Apache SkyWalking Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-21
  • Zipkin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-12-01

Apache SkyWalking videos

Chapter04 Session10 - Apache Skywalking by Sheng Wu

More videos:

  • Review - Apache SkyWalking | Top 42 Alternatives of Apache SkyWalking
  • Review - Observability in Service Mesh Powered by Envoy and Apache SkyWalking - Sheng Wu & Lizan Zhou

Zipkin videos

Spring Tips: Zipkin and Distributed Tracing

More videos:

  • Review - Schibsted Tech: An introduction to distributed tracing and Zipkin
  • Review - ROLLER MI? AÇIK KAFA ZIPKIN MI? (ROLLER OR CLASSIC HEAD )

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache SkyWalking and Zipkin)
Monitoring Tools
34 34%
66% 66
Log Management
43 43%
57% 57
Development
100 100%
0% 0
Performance Monitoring
25 25%
75% 75

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Zipkin should be more popular than Apache SkyWalking. It has been mentiond 27 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache SkyWalking mentions (14)

  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Five Apache projects you probably didn't know about
    Apache SkyWalking is an APM tool, focusing on microservices, Cloud Native apps, and Kuernetes architectures. It builds its architecture on four kinds of components:. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • JDK 21 Release Notes
    > Where's Java primarily used these days? I've seen a lot of enterprise-y webdev projects use it for back end stuff (Dropwizard, Spring Boot, Vert.X, Quarkus) and in rare cases even front end (like Vaadin or JSF/PrimeFaces). The IDEs are pretty great, especially the ones by JetBrains, the tooling is pretty mature and boring, the performance is really good (memory usage aside) and the language itself is... okay.... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • OpenTelemetry in 2023
    > What should people use? I recall Apache Skywalking being pretty good, especially for smaller/medium scale projects: https://skywalking.apache.org/ The architecture is simple, the performance is adequate, it doesn't make you spend days configuring it and it even supports various different data stores: https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/main/v9.0.0/en/setup/backend/backend-storage/ The problems with it are that it... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Monitoring Microservices with Prometheus and Grafana
    Personally I've also used Apache Skywalking for a decent out of the box experience: https://skywalking.apache.org/ I've also heard good things about Sentry, though if you need to self-host it, then there's a bit of complexity to deal with: https://sentry.io/welcome/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

Zipkin mentions (27)

  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • The Road to GraphQL At Enterprise Scale
    From the perspective of the realization of GraphQL infrastructure, the interesting direction is "Finding". How to find the problem? How to find the bottleneck of the system? Distributed Tracing System (DTS) will help answer this question. Distributed tracing is a method of observing requests as they propagate through distributed environments. In our scenario, we have dozens of subgraphs, gateway, and... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • OpenTelemetry Exporters - Types and Configuration Steps
    Zipkin is a distributed tracing system used for tracking and analyzing how requests move through complex systems, especially in setups with many interconnected services, known as microservices. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • The Complete Microservices Guide
    Distributed Tracing: Middleware for distributed tracing like Jaeger and Zipkin helps monitor and trace requests as they flow through multiple microservices, aiding in debugging, performance optimization, and understanding the system's behavior. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS
    For microservice tracing, you might want to look at Zipkin [0], or OpenTelemetry [1] [0] https://zipkin.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache SkyWalking and Zipkin, you can also consider the following products

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Open Telemetry - An observability framework for cloud-native software.

VPSSIM - VPSSIM provides installer enabling users to install LEMP stack on their servers.