head to head · open source
NetData vs thanos
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars, 6,717 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thanos has 14,266 stars, 2,404 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. NetData leads on adoption by 470% (81,255 vs 14,266 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; thanos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, thanos 17%. NetData was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cncf), 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
| NetData | thanos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 14K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NetData if
- You weight community size — 81K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 NetData
X Ray Vision for your infrastructure! Every Metric, Every Second. No BS. Visit our Home Page MENU: WHO WE ARE KEY FEATURES GETTING STARTED HOW IT WORKS FAQ DOCS COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTE LICENSE [!WARNING] People get addicted to Netdata. Once you use it on your systems, there's no going back. WHO WE ARE Netdata is an open source, real time infrastructure monitoring platform. Monitor, detect, and act across your entire infrastructure. Core Advantages: Instant Insights – With Netdata you can access per second metrics and visualizations. Zero Configuration – You can deploy immediately without complex setup. ML Powered –…
read the full NetData 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 NetData or thanos more popular?
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,266. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and thanos free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and thanos under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and thanos?
NetData is written in Go 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, NetData or thanos?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (81,255 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose thanos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.