SHSelfHostIndex

Jaeger 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?
JA Jaeger End-to-end distributed tracing for microservices VS TH Thanos Highly available Prometheus setup with long-term storage
FeatureJaegerThanos
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0Apache-2.0
LanguageGoGo
Setup difficultyMediumHard
Min. RAM512 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, helmdocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 23,082★ 14,167
First released20172018
ReplacesDatadog APM, New RelicDatadog, Grafana Cloud

Why pick each one

Choose Jaeger if…

  • CNCF graduated project
  • Mature and widely adopted
Jaeger details

Choose Thanos if…

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

Frequently asked questions

Is Jaeger or Thanos better?

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

Are Jaeger and Thanos free and open-source?

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

Can I run Jaeger and Thanos with Docker?

Jaeger: yes. Thanos: yes.

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