opentelemetry vs tracing-futures

Short answerBy steady daily use, opentelemetry is bigger: 843,720 real downloads a day against 243,931 for tracing-futures (3.5x). 1,838 crates depend on opentelemetry and 355 on tracing-futures. opentelemetry last shipped 15 days ago, tracing-futures 5.7 years ago.

opentelemetry

Widely used

Widely used and steady.

1,838 crates depend on it; downloads don't spike on releases.

OpenTelemetry API for Rust

tracing-futures

Established

Established and quiet for years.

355 crates depend on it; no release in the last 90 days, so its count is all steady use.

Utilities for instrumenting `futures` with `tracing`.

opentelemetrytracing-futures · 100% = that crate's normal quiet day, so a spike to 300% is triple its usual traffic

Every number, side by side

Same window, same method	opentelemetry	tracing-futures
Real downloads a day	843,720	243,931
Crates that depend on it	1,838	355
Last release	0.33.1, 15 days ago	0.2.5, 5.7 years ago
Trend vs the field	+7%	+6%
Release-window share	4.3%	0.0%
Downloads in the window	75,792,285	21,700,469
All-time downloads	303,089,891	151,716,280
Versions published	44	10
License	Apache-2.0	MIT
MSRV	1.75.0	not set
First published	Nov 8, 2019	Jun 27, 2019

Which to pick

Downloads tell you what is common, not what fits. Each crate's own description above says what it is for; when the jobs differ, pick by the job.
When both fit, prefer the one more crates depend on (opentelemetry, 1,838 dependents): more eyes, more answered questions, and you may already have it in your tree.
Check the release dates against your own pace: opentelemetry 15 days ago, tracing-futures 5.7 years ago.

Also in this space

tracing-subscriberFoundationalUtilities for implementing and composing `tracing` subscribers1,919,774 a day, 20,192 dependents tracing-coreEstablishedCore primitives for application-level tracing2,617,281 a day, 386 dependents tracing-attributesPulled inProcedural macro attributes for automatically instrumenting functions2,272,684 a day, 48 dependents tracing-serdePulled inA compatibility layer for serializing trace data with `serde`920,901 a day, 34 dependents

Compare 4 of them side by side →

Method

Real downloads = the median day with no release that day or the day before, from the crates.io API (Jul 27, 2026 to Oct 23, 2026). Raw crates.io counts include CI and bots and run high (why); the method is from our 90-day study.

Up next

Another comparison: Same method, same window. Foundational and steady vs widely used and steady.reqwest vs ureqRead it next →

Also worth your time