Last updated: March 2026
TraceKit vs Jaeger
Jaeger is a CNCF-graduated distributed tracing system created at Uber. It excels at one thing: collecting and visualizing traces. TraceKit gives you that plus error tracking, frontend monitoring, session replay, and live code debugging -- fully managed at $29/month.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | TraceKit | Jaeger |
|---|---|---|
| Tracing | ||
| Distributed Tracing | Yes (managed) | Yes (self-hosted) |
| Monitoring | ||
| Live Code Monitoring | Yes -- breakpoints without redeploy | |
| Error Tracking | Yes (browser + backend) | |
| Custom Metrics | No (tracing only) | |
| Alerting | Yes (alerts, escalation policies) | |
| Frontend Observability | ||
| Session Replay | Yes (linked to traces) | |
| Platform | ||
| Setup Time | Under 5 minutes | Hours to days (infrastructure) |
| Managed Service | No (self-hosted only) | |
| Pricing | ||
| Pricing Model | $29/month flat | Free (software) + infrastructure costs |
Pricing Comparison
TraceKit
$29/month
Flat monthly
One price includes distributed tracing, live code monitoring, custom metrics, dashboards, alerts, and security scanning. Zero infrastructure to manage.
Hidden costs: None. What you see is what you pay.
Jaeger
Free (software), $100-300+/month (infrastructure)
Self-hosted (open source)
Free and open-source. Running Jaeger in production requires Cassandra or Elasticsearch costing $100-300+/month.
Hidden costs: Engineering time for setup, maintenance, upgrades, scaling, and on-call. No managed support.
Pricing pain points with Jaeger
- Elasticsearch or Cassandra cluster costs $100-300+/month
- Engineering time for operations is invisible but real
- No built-in alerting means you need a separate monitoring stack
- Storage costs grow linearly with trace volume
Why teams switch to TraceKit
Zero Infrastructure
TraceKit is fully managed -- no Elasticsearch cluster, no Cassandra nodes, no collector scaling.
Live Code Monitoring
Set live breakpoints in production code. Jaeger shows where time was spent but cannot help you debug logic errors at runtime.
Full-Stack Observability
Traces, errors, frontend monitoring, session replay, metrics, and dashboards in one tool. Jaeger provides distributed tracing only.
Common Jaeger pain points
Tracing Only
No metrics, logs, error tracking, or frontend monitoring. You need separate tools for everything else.
Infrastructure Overhead
Running Jaeger in production means operating a storage cluster and managing collector scaling.
When Jaeger might be a better fit
- You need pure open-source with zero vendor lock-in
- You already operate Cassandra or Elasticsearch
- You only need distributed tracing
Frequently Asked Questions
Ready to try TraceKit?
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Information is based on publicly available data as of March 2026. Jaeger is an open-source project.