Brave vs OpenTracing: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Brave and OpenTracing

1. Architecture: Brave is an open-source distributed tracing system that uses Zipkin as its underlying tracing infrastructure. It provides a way to track and understand latency problems in microservice architectures. On the other hand, OpenTracing is a vendor-neutral API standard that allows developers to instrument their applications and create traces. It aims to provide a consistent way of instrumenting applications regardless of the tracing backend used.

2. Scope and Purpose: Brave is primarily focused on providing distributed tracing capabilities and is designed to work well with microservice architectures. It offers features like request tracing, context propagation, and dependency tracking. OpenTracing, however, is a more general-purpose API that aims to standardize instrumentation and provide a consistent way of capturing trace data across different tracing systems.

3. Community and Ecosystem: Brave has a well-established and active open-source community with a wide range of integrations and plugins available. It has been widely adopted and used in production environments by many organizations. OpenTracing, being a vendor-neutral API, has gained support from various tracing systems and has a growing ecosystem of plugins and libraries that implement the OpenTracing API.

4. Adaptability and Flexibility: Brave provides a comprehensive set of features and tools specifically designed for distributed tracing. It offers built-in support for different transport protocols, sampling, and storage options. OpenTracing, however, offers a more flexible approach by providing a consistent API that can be used with multiple tracing systems. It allows developers to switch between different tracing implementations without changing their instrumentation code.

5. Implementation Complexity: Brave, being a complete distributed tracing system, requires some configuration and setup effort to get started. It has its own storage backend and requires setting up a tracing infrastructure. On the other hand, OpenTracing focuses on providing a standard API and does not require any specific infrastructure setup. It can work with various distributed tracing systems, making it easier to switch between different tracing backends.

6. Adoption and Industry Support: Brave has gained significant adoption in the industry and is used by many organizations in production environments. It has a proven track record and is well-suited for tracing complex microservice architectures. OpenTracing, being a vendor-neutral API, has also gained traction and is supported by various tracing systems and frameworks. It offers a standardized way of capturing traces, making it easier for developers to instrument their applications.

In Summary, Brave and OpenTracing differ in architecture, scope, community support, adaptability, implementation complexity, and industry adoption.