Grafana Mimir vs Thanos
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Grafana Mimir
Scalable long-term storage for Prometheus metrics
VS
Thanos
Highly available Prometheus setup with long-term storage
| Feature | Grafana Mimir | Thanos |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 94 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, kubernetes, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,238 | ★ 14,214 |
| First released | 2022 | 2018 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Chronosphere | Datadog, Grafana Cloud |
What are Grafana Mimir and Thanos?
Grafana Mimir
Grafana Mimir is an open-source, horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant time series database for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It is designed to store and query hundreds of millions of active series.
- Massive cardinality support
- Multi-tenant by design
- Fast query engine
- Object storage backend
Thanos
Thanos extends Prometheus with global query view, unlimited retention, and high availability. It uses object storage to keep metrics cheaply for years while presenting a single query endpoint across many Prometheus instances.
- Global query view
- Unlimited metric retention
- Object storage backend
- Downsampling for fast queries
Grafana Mimir vs Thanos: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana Mimir versus Apache-2.0 for Thanos. Thanos is the more established project (first released 2018), while Grafana Mimir arrived in 2022. Thanos has the considerably larger community, at 14,214 GitHub stars versus 5,238.
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana Mimir if…
- Proven at billion-series scale
- Easier to operate than Cortex
Watch out for
- Resource intensive
- Complex for small homelabs
Choose Thanos if…
- Scales Prometheus to massive deployments
- Cheap long-term storage
Watch out for
- Complex multi-component architecture
- Steep learning curve
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Mimir 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 Grafana Mimir and Thanos free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana Mimir is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Thanos under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana Mimir and Thanos with Docker?
Grafana Mimir: yes. Thanos: yes.