groundcover vs OpenZipkin
groundcover
groundcover.com
OpenZipkin
zipkin.ioSide by side
| Figure | groundcover | OpenZipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $30/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 8.3 (#10) | 7.3 (#20) |
| Deployment | Bring Your Own Cloud deploys the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it, and the UI is hosted by groundcover. | The quickstart describes running Zipkin with Docker, Java, Homebrew, or from source. |
| Support | Standard support offers business-hours availability with stated response targets from under 8 hours for critical issues to under 72 hours for low-priority issues. | The project directs users to its Gitter chat for questions and says the OpenZipkin organization is primarily volunteers. |
Plans
In their own words
groundcover
groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform for monitoring production environments. Its eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs, and traces without code changes or manual instrumentation, processes data at the edge, and the product states that ingestion happens in real time without sampling. Bring Your Own Cloud deployment puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it and hosts the UI. Fully On-Prem deployment places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. Integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. Agent Mode can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries, and OTTL pipelines. The Free plan is free forever and includes 12-hour data retention and Slack Community support; paid plans start at $30 per host per month. Billing is based on average monthly monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts, not telemetry volume. The platform is available on Linux, self-hosted, and web.