Langfuse vs Zipkin
Which one do AI engines recommend, and how do they differ on price, fit and features?
The short answer
Langfuse is the stronger AI pick in Observability: it has a visibility score of 1.4 versus 0.3 for Zipkin.
Choose Langfuse if…
- You want the brand AI engines rank higher (1.4 vs 0.3)
- AI answers describe it more positively (50% vs 0% positive)
- You need a self-hosted or on-premises option
- You need SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 or HIPAA-ready region or GDPR coverage
Choose Zipkin if…
No clear advantage in the published data.
AI visibility side by side
Latest weekly run · Nov 3
| Metric | Langfuse | Zipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility score | 1.4% | 0.3% |
| Change vs last week | New | New |
| Rank in Observability | #27 | #36 |
| Share of voice | 0.4% | 0.1% |
| Mentions this run | 2 | 1 |
| Positive in AI answers | 50% | 0% |
The stronger value in each row is marked with a ✓.
Visibility score trend
Weekly runs over the last 60 days
Langfuse 0pp · Zipkin 0pp over 0 weekly runs.
Engine by engine
Langfuse leads on 1 of 3 engines
Head to head in AI answers
0 engine answers name both brands
Features, pricing & fit
| Dimension | Langfuse | Zipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Usage-based | — |
| Entry price | Free; paid from $29 / mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Deployment | Langfuse Cloud in US, EU, Japan and HIPAA regions, or self-hosted under the MIT license | Self-hosted: run the self-contained executable jar or the openzipkin/zipkin Docker image. The server requires JRE 17 or newer and serves the UI on port 9411 by default. |
| Integrations | 100+ | — |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA-ready region, GDPR | — |
| Support | Community support via GitHub, In-app support, Private Slack or MS Teams channel on Pro and Enterprise plans, Named lead support engineer on Enterprise plans | Zipkin Gitter chat channel, GitHub issues |
| Founded | — | 2012 |
| Funding | Seed · $4M raised | — |
| Best for | Engineering teams building LLM applications and AI agents that want open-source, self-hostable tracing and evaluation | Teams troubleshooting latency problems in service architectures |
Plans side by side
Zipkin
Pricing not available.
Pros and cons
Themes from the AI answers that mention each brand
Langfuse
- Discounted cloud pricing for qualifying early-stage startups
- Well suited to evaluating and debugging LLM or agent behavior
Zipkin
Profile in progress.
Data collected ·ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode·coverage 100%·next run
Cite as: SlateIndex, “Langfuse vs Zipkin”, https://slateindex.ai/compare/langfuse-vs-zipkin, data of Nov 3, 2026. Licence: CC BY 4.0.