SHSelfHostIndex

Pinpoint APM vs Thanos

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
PI Pinpoint APM Application performance management for large-scale systems VS TH Thanos Highly available Prometheus setup with long-term storage
FeaturePinpoint APMThanos
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0Apache-2.0
LanguageJavaGo
Setup difficultyHardHard
Min. RAM2,048 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metaldocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 13,855★ 14,167
First released20152018
ReplacesNew Relic, DynatraceDatadog, Grafana Cloud

Why pick each one

Choose Pinpoint APM if…

  • Detailed call-stack tracing
  • Good for large JVM systems
Pinpoint APM details

Choose Thanos if…

  • Scales Prometheus to massive deployments
  • Cheap long-term storage
Thanos details

Frequently asked questions

Is Pinpoint APM or Thanos better?

Neither is universally better. Thanos has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Pinpoint APM and Thanos free and open-source?

Yes. Pinpoint APM is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Thanos under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Pinpoint APM and Thanos with Docker?

Pinpoint APM: yes. Thanos: yes.

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