Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Grafana VS Thanos.io

Compare Grafana VS Thanos.io and see what are their differences

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Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Thanos.io logo Thanos.io

Open source, highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities.
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Thanos.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-21

Grafana

$ Details
Release Date
2014 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
New York
City
New York
Founder(s)
Anthony Woods
Employees
100 - 249

Grafana features and specs

  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages of Grafana

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.

Thanos.io features and specs

  • Global View
    Thanos provides a global view of all your Prometheus metrics, allowing you to query across multiple clusters and data sources seamlessly.
  • High Availability
    Thanos enables high availability by providing redundancy and failover for data queries, ensuring continuous access to metric data even if one or more Prometheus instances fail.
  • Long-term Storage
    Thanos offers long-term storage for Prometheus metrics, allowing users to store data efficiently beyond the retention period offered by Prometheus.
  • Scalability
    Designed to scale horizontally, Thanos can handle increased workloads and large volumes of data, accommodating growing environments.
  • Compatibility
    Thanos is fully compatible with Prometheus, which means you can integrate it without changing your existing Prometheus setup.

Possible disadvantages of Thanos.io

  • Complexity
    Setting up and managing Thanos can be complex compared to a standalone Prometheus installation, requiring additional components and configurations.
  • Resource Intensive
    Thanos can be resource-intensive, necessitating more storage and compute resources to handle data deduplication and global querying effectively.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers and operations teams may face a learning curve in adopting Thanos, requiring time to understand its architecture and best practices.
  • Network Overhead
    Using Thanos can introduce network overhead due to data being transferred across clusters and remote storage solutions, potentially impacting performance.
  • Dependency Management
    Implementing Thanos adds more components and dependencies to an infrastructure, which can lead to increased management and maintenance efforts.

Analysis of Grafana

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Grafana is generally considered to be a good choice for users looking for a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly data visualization tool. Its ability to integrate with numerous data sources and its rich feature set make it a popular choice among developers, engineers, and IT operations teams.

Why this product is good

  • Grafana is widely regarded as a robust and versatile open-source data visualization and monitoring platform. It supports a wide range of data sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and many others, making it highly adaptable for various use cases. Grafana's intuitive and interactive dashboards allow users to visually track the performance and health of their system in real-time, enhance operational efficiency, and facilitate better decision-making. Its strong community support, frequent updates, and rich plugin ecosystem further contribute to its reputation as a reliable tool for monitoring and analytics.

Recommended for

    Grafana is particularly recommended for IT professionals, data analysts, and engineers who need to monitor and visualize large datasets in real-time. It's ideal for organizations running complex systems or applications that require comprehensive monitoring to ensure uptime and performance are maintained. Additionally, Grafana is suitable for teams that value open-source solutions and require a platform that can integrate with multiple data sources and adapt to various monitoring needs.

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

  • Review - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • Review - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

Thanos.io videos

No Thanos.io videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Grafana and Thanos.io)
Monitoring Tools
96 96%
4% 4
Dev Ops
0 0%
100% 100
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Grafana and Thanos.io

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though it’s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since you’ve landed yourself here, I’m guessing that you’re one of those people. Fear not! We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafana’s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Thanos.io Reviews

We have no reviews of Thanos.io yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana should be more popular than Thanos.io. It has been mentiond 240 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Grafana mentions (240)

  • The synergy between DevOps and Cloud Computing
    Monitoring and Logging: Tools like Prometheus and Grafana provide instant observability. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • Project of the Week: Grafana
    Grafana is a leading open-source platform for monitoring, visualization, and observability. Since its initial launch in 2014, Grafana has grown to become the standard for time series analytics, with over 68,000 GitHub stars and a thriving ecosystem of plugins and integrations. The platform allows users to query, visualize, alert on, and understand metrics no matter where they're stored, enabling the creation of... - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • Send Node.js logs from Docker to Grafana Cloud with Alloy
    Navigate to Grafana Cloud and sign up or log in. In the sidebar, select Connections → Add new connection, select Loki. This is the place that prompts you to set up your Loki connection and allows you to generate an access token for Alloy. - Source: dev.to / 29 days ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to Optimize Your Fintech API in 2025: A Guide
    Prometheus: This open-source monitoring solution pairs with Grafana for powerful custom visualization of exactly what matters to your business. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
View more

Thanos.io mentions (32)

  • Top 10 Prometheus Alternatives in 2024 [Includes Open-Source]
    Thanos is a set of components that can be added to an existing Prometheus deployment to enable long-term storage and global query view. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Scaling Prometheus with Thanos
    Started in November 2017, Thanos is an open-source CNCF incubating project with over 12.8k stars on GitHub. Built on top of Prometheus, Thanos aims to provide a highly available Prometheus environment with long-term storage support and a global view of metrics. Companies like Disney, Abode, eBay, SoundCloud, and ByteDance use Thanos for monitoring at scale. However, setting up Thanos can be complex and requires... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Fastly and the Linux kernel
    The open source projects Fastly uses and the foundations we partner with are vital to Fastly’s mission and success. Here's an unscientific list of projects and organizations supported by the Linux Foundation that we use and love include: The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, containerd, eBPF, Falco, OpenAPI Initiative, ESLint, Express, Fastify, Lodash, Mocha, Node.js, Prometheus, Jenkins, OpenTelemetry, Envoy, etcd, Helm,... - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Looking for a way to remote in to K's of raspberry pi's...
    Monitoring = netdata on each RPi https://www.netdata.cloud/ binded to the vpn interface being scraped into a prometeus thaons https://thanos.io/ setup with grafana to give management the Green all is good screens (very important). Source: over 1 year ago
  • Monitoring multiple kubernetes cluster with single Prometheus operator
    Sounds like you want something like Thanos. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Grafana and Thanos.io, you can also consider the following products

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

OpenCensus - Application and Data, Monitoring, and Monitoring Tools

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Cortex Project - Horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term Prometheus.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.