SHSelfHostIndex

Kibana 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?
KI Kibana Visualization and exploration for Elasticsearch data VS TH Thanos Highly available Prometheus setup with long-term storage
FeatureKibanaThanos
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptGo
Setup difficultyMediumHard
Min. RAM1,024 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, binarydocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 21,230★ 14,167
First released20132018
ReplacesSplunk, DatadogDatadog, Grafana Cloud

Why pick each one

Choose Kibana if…

  • Rich visualization options
  • Mature ecosystem
Kibana details

Choose Thanos if…

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

Frequently asked questions

Is Kibana or Thanos better?

Kibana 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 Kibana and Thanos free and open-source?

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

Can I run Kibana and Thanos with Docker?

Kibana: yes. Thanos: yes.

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