Thanos

Highly available Prometheus with long-term object storage

As of 29 August 2026, Thanos is free to use. Adds global query, unlimited retention and high availability to Prometheus using object storage. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Thanos is made by Cloud Native Computing Foundation, available on Self-hosted, Linux.

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Overview

What Thanos does

Thanos is a CNCF-incubating project that extends Prometheus with global querying, high availability and effectively unlimited retention backed by object storage. It runs as a set of components alongside existing Prometheus servers rather than replacing them. It exists because Prometheus is deliberately single-node and local-storage-based. Once an organisation has many Prometheus instances and wants one query across all of them, plus retention measured in years without local disk cost, Thanos is the established answer — sidecars ship blocks to S3-compatible storage, and a querier fans out across everything.

What people use it for

Querying metrics across many clusters or regions from one place
Retaining metrics for years without local disk growth
Removing the gap that appears when a single Prometheus instance restarts

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Thanos.

Several components — sidecar, store, querier, compactor, ruler — each with its own configuration and failure modes
The compactor is a common source of operational trouble and must not run twice against the same bucket
Query latency over object storage is meaningfully higher than local Prometheus
Object storage costs and API request charges become real at high volume

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Thanos

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Thanosvs
Prometheus
Prometheus: The metrics server Thanos extends rather than replaces
Thanosvs
VictoriaMetrics
VictoriaMetrics: A single-system alternative for long retention, with fewer components to operate
Thanosvs
Grafana
Grafana: The query and dashboard layer used on top of either

Pricing

What Thanos costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Thanos

Free

Full functionality
No usage limits
Community support

Capabilities

Features

Global query
One PromQL query across many Prometheus instances
Object storage retention
Long-term blocks in S3-compatible storage rather than local disk
Deduplication
Merges data from redundant Prometheus pairs into one series
Downsampling
Reduces resolution of older data to keep long-range queries fast

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Thanos free?

Yes, open source and CNCF-incubating. Costs are the object storage it uses.

Does Thanos replace Prometheus?

No. It runs alongside existing Prometheus servers, adding global query, deduplication and long-term storage.

Thanos or VictoriaMetrics?

Thanos layers onto Prometheus using object storage and is the more established multi-cluster answer. VictoriaMetrics is a separate store aiming at lower resource use and fewer moving parts.

Keep looking

Where to go from Thanos

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Thanos, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.