head to head · open source
Sentry vs thanos
Sentry has 45,697 GitHub stars, 4,959 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thanos has 14,266 stars, 2,404 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 220% (45,697 vs 14,266 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; thanos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, thanos 17%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (hacktoberfest, 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Sentry | thanos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 14K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 46K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- 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 Sentry
Users and logs provide clues. Sentry provides answers. What's Sentry? Sentry is the debugging platform that helps every developer detect, trace, and fix issues. Code breaks, fix it faster. Official Sentry SDKs JavaScript Electron React Native Python Ruby PHP Laravel Go Rust Java/Kotlin Objective C/Swift C\ /F\ C/C++ Dart/Flutter Perl Clojure Elixir Unity Unreal Engine Godot Engine PowerShell Resources Documentation Discussions (Bugs, feature requests, general questions) Discord Contributing Bug Tracker Code Transifex (Translate Sentry\!)
read the full Sentry 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 →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or thanos more popular?
Sentry has 45,697 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,266. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and thanos free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and thanos is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and thanos?
Sentry is written in Python 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, Sentry or thanos?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (45,697 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose thanos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.