Loki vs Zipkin
Which one do AI engines recommend, and how do they differ on price, fit and features?
The short answer
Loki is the stronger AI pick in Observability: it has a visibility score of 12 versus 0.3 for Zipkin, and ranks ahead in 100% of the answers that name both.
Choose Loki if…
- You want the brand AI engines rank higher (12 vs 0.3)
- AI answers describe it more positively (7% vs 0% positive)
- You need SOC 2 or ISO/IEC 27001 or ISO 22301 or PCI DSS v4.0.1 or GDPR or TISAX or CSA STAR or FedRAMP High or TX-RAMP Level 2 coverage
- Open-source, standards-driven telemetry stack
Choose Zipkin if…
No clear advantage in the published data.
AI visibility side by side
Latest weekly run · Nov 3
| Metric | Loki | Zipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility score | 12% | 0.3% |
| Change vs last week | New | New |
| Rank in Observability | #11 | #36 |
| Share of voice | 4.7% | 0.1% |
| Mentions this run | 27 | 1 |
| Positive in AI answers | 7% | 0% |
The stronger value in each row is marked with a ✓.
Visibility score trend
Weekly runs over the last 60 days
Loki 0pp · Zipkin 0pp over 0 weekly runs.
Engine by engine
Loki leads on 3 of 3 engines
Head to head in AI answers
1 engine answers name both brands
| Prompt | Engine | Loki | Zipkin |
|---|---|---|---|
| What should an observability platform integrate with? | ChatGPT | #6 | #8 |
Features, pricing & fit
| Dimension | Loki | Zipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Self-hosted or through Grafana Cloud | 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. |
| Compliance | SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 22301, PCI DSS v4.0.1, GDPR, TISAX, CSA STAR, FedRAMP High, TX-RAMP Level 2 | — |
| Support | — | Zipkin Gitter chat channel, GitHub issues |
| Founded | 2018 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | New York, NY | — |
| Employees | 1,001–5,000 | — |
| Funding | Series E · $660M raised | — |
| Best for | — | Teams troubleshooting latency problems in service architectures |
Pros and cons
Themes from the AI answers that mention each brand
Loki
- Open-source, standards-driven telemetry stack
- Composable dashboards and data visualization
- Built natively around OpenTelemetry
- Managed cloud offering with a permanent free tier
- Cost-effective compared with licensed platforms
- Requires internal engineering time to maintain, configure, and scale
- Ongoing infrastructure, storage, and maintenance costs
Zipkin
Profile in progress.
Data collected ·ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode·coverage 100%·next run
Cite as: SlateIndex, “Loki vs Zipkin”, https://slateindex.ai/compare/loki-vs-zipkin, data of Nov 3, 2026. Licence: CC BY 4.0.