New Relic vs Zipkin: What are the differences?

Introduction New Relic and Zipkin are both popular distributed tracing systems used for monitoring and troubleshooting applications. While they have similar purposes, there are some key differences between the two.

1. Data Collection Methods: One key difference between New Relic and Zipkin is their approach to data collection. New Relic primarily uses an agent-based approach, where an agent installed on the application server collects and sends data to the New Relic platform. On the other hand, Zipkin is based on an instrumentation approach, where developers need to add code instrumentation to their applications to capture tracing data.

2. Scalability and Performance: Another difference between New Relic and Zipkin lies in their scalability and performance capabilities. New Relic is a fully managed cloud-based solution that automatically scales to handle large volumes of data and offers high availability. In contrast, Zipkin is a self-hosted solution that requires manual setup and configuration, making its scalability and performance dependent on the resources available in the hosting environment.

3. Supported Programming Languages and Frameworks: New Relic provides support for a wide range of programming languages and frameworks out of the box, including Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, and more. It offers comprehensive language-specific instrumentation and provides integration with popular frameworks. On the other hand, Zipkin has a more extensible approach, allowing developers to implement custom instrumentation for various programming languages and frameworks.

4. Alerting and Monitoring Capabilities: New Relic offers advanced alerting and monitoring capabilities, allowing users to set up alerts based on specific conditions and thresholds. It provides a rich set of built-in monitoring dashboards and customizable reports for deep insights into application performance. In contrast, Zipkin focuses more on the core tracing capabilities and does not provide built-in alerting and monitoring features. Users may need to integrate Zipkin with other monitoring tools to achieve similar functionality.

5. Community and Ecosystem: New Relic has built a large community around its platform, with a wide range of resources, user forums, and knowledge base articles available. It also has an extensive ecosystem of third-party integrations and plugins for seamless integration with various tools and technologies. On the other hand, Zipkin, being an open-source project, also has an active community but with a relatively smaller userbase. While it has some integrations available, the ecosystem may not be as extensive as New Relic.

6. Pricing and Cost: The pricing models for New Relic and Zipkin are different. New Relic follows a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay based on the number of monitored hosts and the selected plan. The pricing includes all features, support, and infrastructure costs. Zipkin, being an open-source project, is free to use, but it requires manual setup and infrastructure provisioning, which may incur additional hosting costs.

In summary, New Relic and Zipkin offer distributed tracing capabilities but differ in their data collection methods, scalability, supported languages, alerting capabilities, community size, and pricing models. Users can choose based on their specific requirements, preference for a managed solution, or customization needs.