Best Open Source APM Tools 2026

SigNoz provides a unified open-source platform for traces, metrics, and logs with a Datadog-like UI. Built on ClickHouse for high-performance analytics, it offers the most complete self-hosted APM experience. Single Docker Compose deployment makes it the easiest to get started with. The cloud-hosted option starts at $199/month for teams that prefer managed infrastructure.

Jaeger is the CNCF graduated distributed tracing platform originally developed at Uber. It is the most widely deployed open-source tracing tool with production usage at thousands of organizations. Jaeger supports multiple storage backends (Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka) and provides excellent trace visualization. It focuses purely on tracing rather than full observability.

Zipkin is one of the original distributed tracing systems, inspired by Google's Dapper paper. Its simplicity is its strength -- a single JAR file can get you started with trace collection and visualization. Zipkin supports in-memory, MySQL, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch storage. While it lacks the features of newer tools, its stability and minimal resource requirements make it ideal for teams with modest tracing needs.

Grafana Tempo is a high-scale distributed tracing backend designed to work seamlessly with the Grafana visualization platform. Unlike Jaeger or Zipkin, Tempo stores traces in object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob), dramatically reducing storage costs at scale. Combined with Grafana, Loki, and Mimir, it forms a complete open-source observability stack. The trade-off is operational complexity -- Tempo is designed for Kubernetes environments and requires familiarity with distributed systems.

Prometheus is the CNCF graduated metrics monitoring system that has become the de facto standard for cloud-native metrics. Combined with Grafana for visualization, it provides powerful metric collection, alerting, and dashboarding. PromQL is one of the most expressive query languages for time-series data. Prometheus does not handle traces or logs natively, so teams pair it with Jaeger or Loki for complete observability.

Uptrace is an open-source APM built on ClickHouse that accepts OpenTelemetry data natively. It provides traces, metrics, and logs with a modern UI. Uptrace focuses on the OpenTelemetry ecosystem rather than building proprietary agents, making it a good choice for teams that have already invested in OTel instrumentation. The community is smaller than SigNoz or Jaeger, but the project is actively maintained.

Apache SkyWalking is an APM system designed for microservices, cloud native, and container-based architectures. Originally built for Java environments, it has expanded to support multiple languages. SkyWalking provides automatic instrumentation via Java agents, topology maps, and a metrics analysis platform. It has strong adoption in the Asia-Pacific region and is well-suited for Java-heavy microservice architectures.