No. 14 of 29 ·Distributed Tracing Tools

OpenZipkin

Web · Self-hosted

Freedom report

Two barsScore 6.4

Free tierA free tier is on its own pricing page
Open codeNo open-source code on record
Runs widely1 of 6 device platforms
DocumentedPlans, terms and facts published

OpenZipkin is ranked #14 of 29 in distributed tracing tools on Freedom251. It runs on Self-hosted, Web. There is a free plan.

OpenZipkin plans and pricing

All plans

Zipkin (open-source software) Free Self-hosted tracing system; no hosted plan or price stated zipkin.io · 2 Oct 2026

Compared on distributed tracing tools

Free plan: Yes
OpenTelemetry support: Yes
Service map: Yes
Tail-based sampling: No
Deployment model: self_hosted

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The record

Purpose: Zipkin collects and looks up tracing data to help troubleshoot latency in service architectures.
Trace search: Users can open a trace by ID or query by service, operation name, tags, and duration.
Trace summaries: The UI summarizes the percentage of time spent in a service and whether operations failed.
Dependency diagram: The UI includes a dependency diagram showing how many traced requests went through each application.
Data collection: Applications must be instrumented to report trace data; listed transports include HTTP, Kafka, ActiveMQ, gRPC, and RabbitMQ.
Storage: The site lists in-memory storage and persistent backends including MySQL, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch.
Instrumentation: The instrumentation list includes supported and community-supported libraries for languages including C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Scala, PHP, Python, and Lua.
Deployment: The quickstart describes running Zipkin with Docker, Java, Homebrew, or from source.
Java requirement: The quickstart says Java 17 or higher is required for its self-contained executable JAR option.
Security limitation: The architecture page says the web UI has no built-in authentication.
Support: The project directs users to its Gitter chat for questions and says the OpenZipkin organization is primarily volunteers.
Maker: OpenZipkin is the open-source organization that stewards Zipkin code, documentation, specifications, and support; Zipkin was originally created at Twitter.
Price from: Free

Where it ranks on Freedom251

Best Distributed Tracing Tools in 2026#14 of 29

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Sources

zipkin.io· checked 2 Oct 2026
zipkin.io/pages/extensions_choices· checked 2 Oct 2026
zipkin.io/pages/tracers_instrumentation· checked 2 Oct 2026
zipkin.io/pages/quickstart· checked 2 Oct 2026
zipkin.io/pages/architecture.html· checked 2 Oct 2026
zipkin.io/pages/community.html· checked 2 Oct 2026