Grafana Tempo vs Jaeger vs Zipkin — Distributed Tracing Tools 2026

Distributed tracing tells you why a request was slow. Without it, you're guessing which of your 20 microservices added that latency.

Quick Comparison

Grafana Tempo — Best for Grafana Stack Teams

Stores traces in S3/GCS. No indexing = cheap storage, but you need a trace ID to find traces (get from Prometheus exemplars or Loki logs).

helm install tempo grafana/tempo \
  --set storage.trace.backend=s3 \
  --set storage.trace.s3.bucket=my-traces-bucket \
  --set storage.trace.s3.region=us-east-1

Best for: Teams already on Prometheus + Grafana + Loki.

Jaeger — Best for Rich Search

Full indexing via Elasticsearch. Search traces by service, operation, duration, tags. More powerful, more expensive.

apiVersion: jaegertracing.io/v1
kind: Jaeger
metadata:
  name: jaeger
spec:
  strategy: production
  storage:
    type: elasticsearch

Best for: Complex microservices where you need to find "all slow DB calls across services."

Zipkin — Best for Spring Boot

Native Spring Boot support via Micrometer. Simplest setup.

management:
  zipkin:
    tracing:
      endpoint: http://zipkin:9411/api/v2/spans
  tracing:
    sampling:
      probability: 0.1

Best for: Java/Spring Boot teams wanting fast setup.

Use OpenTelemetry for All Three

Instrument once, switch backends without code changes:

from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
# Change endpoint to point to Tempo, Jaeger, or Zipkin collector
exporter = OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://otel-collector:4317")

Decision: Using Grafana already? → Tempo. Need search? → Jaeger. Spring Boot? → Zipkin.

Learn observability with real clusters at KodeKloud.