Prometheus 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?
Compare Prometheus with
choose an app… Uptime Kuma Netdata Grafana Superset Metabase Portainer CE Umami PostHog CasaOS Glance What's Up Status Postiz Netron Glances Homepage SigNoz InfluxDB Grafana k6 Redash Grafana Loki Plausible Dashy Apache SkyWalking Beszel Dockge Jaeger Vector Matomo Kibana GoAccess OpenObserve Cube cAdvisor Telegraf VictoriaMetrics Zipkin Upptime Phlare Logstash Sampler Dashboard Druid Dozzle Pinpoint APM Unleash Node Exporter Fluentd OpenSearch Rybbit Gatus Grafana Pyroscope Homer Checkmate Healthchecks HyperDX Benphelps Homepage Heimdall Beszel Hub Alertmanager Graylog ntopng Scrutiny Fluent Bit Coroot OpenTelemetry Collector Hertzbeat Statup Status WatchYourLAN NetAlertX Pulse Monitor Zabbix Graphite Speedtest Tracker Cortex Blackbox Exporter Grafana Tempo Grafana Mimir Kener Parca LibreNMS Monitoror Errbit Uptrace mtail Grafana OnCall Redis Exporter Vmstat Exporter PostgreSQL Exporter Grafana Alloy collectd Pushgateway Robusta Cstate Karma Kafka Exporter MySQL Server Exporter Kapacitor Perses Checkmk Kuberhealthy Icinga 2 PHP Server Monitor SNMP Exporter Process Exporter Munin VictoriaLogs Elasticsearch Exporter Grafana Beyla Nagios Core NGINX Prometheus Exporter Statping-ng Bugsink Smokeping Vigil Cacti Mailrise Domain Locker Proxmox VE Exporter Oncall Peekaping OpenNMS Horizon Shinken ElastAlert 2 Grafana Faro Sensu Go Percona Monitoring and Management Icinga Web 2 Kuma Mieru JSON Exporter Smokeping Prober Argus Monitor Web PHP-FPM Exporter Cloudprober Ping Exporter Monika IPMI Exporter SQL Exporter smartctl Exporter Pandora FMS Community Thruk NetXMS Apache Exporter NUT Exporter Speedtest Exporter Monit Naemon Bytebot Watch Fail2Ban Webinterface Lunalytics Observium Phoenix Panel
Compare Thanos with
choose an app… Uptime Kuma Netdata Grafana Glances SigNoz InfluxDB Grafana k6 Grafana Loki Apache SkyWalking Beszel Jaeger Vector Kibana GoAccess OpenObserve cAdvisor Telegraf VictoriaMetrics Zipkin Upptime Phlare Logstash Dozzle Pinpoint APM Node Exporter Fluentd HyperDX Coroot Hertzbeat Pulse Monitor Zabbix Graphite Cortex Grafana Mimir Monitoror Uptrace Chronograf
Feature Prometheus Thanos Category Monitoring & Status Monitoring & Status License Apache-2.0 Apache-2.0 Language Go Go Setup difficulty Medium Hard Min. RAM 512 MB 1,024 MB Deployment docker, binary, helm docker, kubernetes, helm GitHub stars ★ 65,616 ★ 14,167 First released 2015 2018 Replaces Datadog Datadog, Grafana Cloud
Why pick each one
Choose Prometheus if… Powerful query language Reliable and scalable Huge ecosystem Prometheus details Choose Thanos if… Scales Prometheus to massive deployments Cheap long-term storage Thanos details
Frequently asked questions Is Prometheus or Thanos better? Prometheus 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 Prometheus and Thanos free and open-source? Yes. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Thanos under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Prometheus and Thanos with Docker? Prometheus: yes. Thanos: yes.