head to head · open source
Grafana vs thanos
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars, 14,905 forks, 3,326 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thanos has 14,266 stars, 2,404 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Grafana leads on adoption by 444% (77,638 vs 14,266 stars). Grafana is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; thanos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Grafana has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, thanos 17%. Grafana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (go, hacktoberfest, metrics, monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Grafana | thanos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Grafana if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick thanos if
- You want the thanos feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and thanos fits your workflow better
About Grafana
The open source platform for monitoring and observability Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture: Visualizations: Fast and flexible client side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs. Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic & reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad hoc queries and dynamic…
read the full Grafana overview →
About thanos
📢 ThanosCon happened on 19th March 2024 as a co located half day on KubeCon EU in Paris. Overview Thanos is a set of components that can be composed into a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity, which can be added seamlessly on top of existing Prometheus deployments. Thanos is a CNCF Incubating project. Thanos leverages the Prometheus 2.0 storage format to cost efficiently store historical metric data in any object storage while retaining fast query latencies. Additionally, it provides a global query view across all Prometheus installations and can merge data from Prometheus HA pairs on…
read the full thanos overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or thanos more popular?
Grafana has 77,638 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,266. Grafana has the larger community by that measure.
Are Grafana and thanos free?
Both are open source. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and thanos under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Grafana and thanos?
Grafana is written in TypeScript and thanos in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Grafana or thanos?
Choose Grafana if you want the larger community (77,638 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose thanos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.