Software Alternatives & Reviews

Zipkin VS LightStep

Compare Zipkin VS LightStep and see what are their differences

Zipkin logo Zipkin

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. 

LightStep logo LightStep

We deliver insights that put organizations back in control of their complex software apps.
  • Zipkin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-12-01
  • LightStep Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-21

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 )

LightStep videos

Lightstep Chronicles Review: The Shiniest Sci-Fi Visual Novel!

More videos:

  • Review - Lightstep Chronicles Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Zipkin and LightStep)
Monitoring Tools
61 61%
39% 39
Log Management
72 72%
28% 28
Performance Monitoring
58 58%
42% 42
Application Performance Monitoring

User comments

Share your experience with using Zipkin and LightStep. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Zipkin should be more popular than LightStep. 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.

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 2 months 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 / 7 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 / 8 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 / 10 months ago
View more

LightStep mentions (15)

  • KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023: Highlights from Amsterdam
    We focused on the observability ecosystem and took the time to interact with our friends from Lightstep, New Relic, Honeycomb, Dynatrace, Instana, and many more. With that in mind, keep an eye out for more integrations coming to Tracetest! - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Top 9 Commercial Distributed Tracing Tools
    Lightstep bills itself as a platform for the reliability of cloud-native applications. The people behind Lightstep co-founded OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing, which gives them a unique perspective on the use cases of distributed tracing and the value of having a vendor-neutral tracing data format. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Observability - Types Of Vendor Pricing Models
    In the last 5 to 10 years, new Observability vendors have entered the market, including Honeycomb, Instana, Lightstep and Datadog. Similarly, traditional APM vendors such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic, as well as SIEM (and log management) vendors such as Splunk and Sumo Logic, have joined them in the Observability space too. Finally you also have major cloud providers such as AWS with their own... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • KubeCon North America 2022: A Retrospective
    I spent Day 2 at the Colony Club to attend OTel Unplugged. This event was sponsored by Lightstep, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Crowdstrike, and NGINX. I came into the event not knowing what to expect. I can sometimes clamp up when I’m around folks that I don’t know, but because I was helping with the event check-in, I got to say hello to a number of the attendees, which helped break the ice. And it... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Grafana Phlare, open source database for continuous profiling at scale
    Https://lightstep.com, but that’s the only one :). - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

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

9 Spokes - 9 Spokes is a free data dashboard that connects your apps to identify powerful insights to deliver your business KPI's.

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

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

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