Jaeger
Shares rank 11 of 16 observability platforms by recommenders
Free, open-source tracing tool people call solid, simple and easy to self-host. One critic finds it heavy to run.
Free, open-source tracing tool people call solid, simple and easy to self-host. One critic finds it heavy to run.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 70%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 2.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Simple, not complicated
“Neither of them are complicated , either, and in fact the fact that they're not complicated is their greatest strength.”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)” “pretty simple for tracing only”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” Easily self-hosted open-source project
“Prometheus and Jaeger are very solid, battle-hardened, popular, well-maintained, easily self-hosted open-source projects.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “you can send traces to some self-hosted FOSS visualizer, like Jaeger”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “PgX – Debug Postgres performance in the context of your application code”
Other observability platforms people recommend
The four most recommended other observability platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grafana | 71 | 41 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| Prometheus | 48 | 24 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Datadog | 40 | 39 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| Sentry | 31 | 30 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| JaegerThis page | 7 | 3 | 70% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
9 of the 10 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Neither of them are complicated , either, and in fact the fact that they're not complicated is their greatest strength.”
“I don't like running heavy alternatives like Jaeger, Tempo”
“have them all work together”
“I kept staring at Jaeger waterfalls trying to figure out why requests were slow”
“you can send traces to some self-hosted FOSS visualizer, like Jaeger”
“Plonk anything in e.g jaeger and any full trace can be looked up from pretty much any value.”
“Jaeger and Tempo aren't going to help you with frontend code.”
“Prometheus and Jaeger are very solid, battle-hardened, popular, well-maintained, easily self-hosted open-source projects.”
“pretty simple for tracing only”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.