Tool profile
Open-source distributed tracing platform for collecting, visualizing, and troubleshooting request flows across services.
Distributed tracing in cloud-native and microservice systems
Jaeger is one of the foundational names in distributed tracing, and it deserves inclusion because it remains a real building-block tool rather than a marketing-layer observability product. It gives teams a way to collect, query, and visualize traces across distributed systems, helping them find latency bottlenecks, failed dependencies, and request-path problems. For many teams, Jaeger is the first serious tracing system they use before deciding whether to stay OSS or move to a more commercial observability platform.
Its economics are straightforward: Jaeger is Apache-2.0 open source and free to use. The tradeoff is that the team owns deployment, scaling, storage, upgrades, and operational complexity. That makes Jaeger appealing for engineering organizations that want tracing capability without SaaS license fees, but less ideal for buyers who really want a managed observability product. Compared with Honeycomb, Jaeger is far lighter on productized collaboration and pricing complexity because the real bill is infrastructure and operator time, not software subscription.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Jaeger is a great directory addition because it is a real default choice in many cloud-native stacks, but it should be framed honestly as tracing infrastructure rather than a polished commercial observability suite.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Jaeger is Apache-2.0 licensed open-source software and free to use. There is no official SaaS list price from the project itself, so the real cost comes from the infrastructure, storage, and operator time required to run it.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
