Detailed comparison across 10 dimensions
Winner: Zipkin
Zipkin clearly comes out ahead of Elastic Observability on Staquest's weighted six-dimension score. Zipkin has a free tier; Elastic Observability does not. Elastic Observability's paid plans start at $99/mo.
| Overview | ||
|---|---|---|
| Type | hybrid | hybrid |
| Company | Elastic | OpenZipkin |
| Free Tier | ||
| Has API | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Learning Curve | - | - |
| Integration | - | - |
| Trending | Stable | Stable |
| GitHub Stars | - | - |
| Industries | DevelopmentEducation & EdTechAI & Machine LearningSaaS & Cloud | Development |
| Categories | observability-apm | observability-apm |
| Website | Visit | Visit |
Zipkin
flat
flat
flat
flat
usage based
custom
open source
| Feature | elastic-observability | zipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Advanced Elastic Stack Security Features | ||
| Apache 2.0 License | ||
| Apps For Apm, Logging, And Metrics | ||
| Community Maintained | ||
| Complete Data Sovereignty | ||
| Self-Hostable | ||
| Complete Project Tier Includes Ai-Assisted Pipelines, Parsing, And Machine Learning | ||
| Cross-Cluster Replication | ||
| Cross-Cluster Search Es|Ql | ||
| Custom Control Over Cluster Capacity And Versions | ||
| Distributed Elasticsearch Platform | ||
| Egress: 50 Gb Free, Then $0.05 Per Gb Transferred Per Month | ||
| Elastic Ai Assistant | ||
| Elastic Maps Server | ||
| Elastic Workflows | ||
| Es|Ql | ||
| Everything In Gold | ||
| Everything In Platinum | ||
| Everything In Standard | ||
| Full Infrastructure Ownership | ||
| Gpu Inference | ||
| Ingest: $0.07 To $0.09 Per Gb Ingested | ||
| Limited Support (3-Business Day Target Response) | ||
| Machine Learning (Anomaly Detection, Supervised Learning, Third-Party Model Management) | ||
| Managed Global Testing For Synthetic Monitoring | ||
| Monitoring On By Default (Autoops) | ||
| Multi-Stack Monitoring | ||
| Reporting | ||
| Retention: $0.017 To $0.019 Per Gb Retained Per Month | ||
| Robust Api/Language Clients |
Showing 30 of 30 features
Dashes mean the feature isn't listed in our data. The tool may still support it.
On Staquest's weighted six-dimension scoring, Zipkin comes out ahead overall, though Elastic Observability can be the better fit depending on your priorities — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown above.
Zipkin offers a free tier; Elastic Observability does not currently list one.
Zipkin scores higher on pricing value in Staquest's analysis. It is the highest-weighted dimension in this comparison.
Zipkin is open source. The feature comparison and dimension scores above cover the full breakdown.
