Glances 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?
FeatureGlancesThanos
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseLGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguagePythonGo
Setup difficultyEasyHard
Min. RAM128 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, binarydocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 33,269★ 14,167
First released20122018
ReplacesDatadogDatadog, Grafana Cloud

Why pick each one

Choose Glances if…

  • Very easy to run
  • Lightweight
  • Good single-host overview
Glances details

Choose Thanos if…

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

Frequently asked questions

Is Glances or Thanos better?

Glances is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Thanos if its specific feature set fits your needs better.

Are Glances and Thanos free and open-source?

Yes. Glances is licensed under LGPL-3.0 and Thanos under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Glances and Thanos with Docker?

Glances: yes. Thanos: yes.

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