head to head · open source
telegraf vs thanos
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thanos has 14,207 stars, 2,369 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped yesterday. telegraf leads on adoption by 25% (17,807 vs 14,207 stars). telegraf is written in Go under MIT; thanos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. telegraf has attracted 33% as many forks as stars, thanos 17%. telegraf was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| telegraf | thanos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.8K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick telegraf if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the MIT 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 telegraf
Telegraf is a Go based, MIT licensed open source agent that collects, processes, aggregates, and writes metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data, and it is aimed at engineers who run their own monitoring and observability pipelines.
read the full telegraf overview →
About thanos
Thanos is a CNCF Incubating, Apache 2.0 licensed collection of Go components that composes a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity on top of an existing Prometheus deployment.
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 telegraf or thanos more popular?
telegraf has 17,807 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,207. telegraf has the larger community by that measure.
Are telegraf and thanos free?
Both are open source. telegraf is licensed under MIT and thanos under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between telegraf and thanos?
telegraf 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, telegraf or thanos?
Choose telegraf if you want the larger community (17,807 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose thanos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.