head to head · open source
telegraf vs thanos
telegraf has 17,893 GitHub stars, 5,846 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thanos has 14,266 stars, 2,404 forks, 908 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. telegraf leads on adoption by 25% (17,893 vs 14,266 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.
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Side by side
| telegraf | thanos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| 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 Telegraf is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data. Offers a comprehensive suite of over 300 plugins, covering a wide range of functionalities including system monitoring, cloud services, and message passing Enables the integration of user defined code to collect, transform, and transmit data efficiently Compiles into a standalone static binary without any external dependencies, ensuring a streamlined deployment process Utilizes TOML for configuration, providing a user friendly and unambiguous setup experience Developed with contributions…
read the full telegraf 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 telegraf or thanos more popular?
telegraf has 17,893 GitHub stars and thanos has 14,266. 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 (17,893 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose thanos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.