Tempo vs Thanos: Key Differences & When to Use Each

Comprehensive side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, and metrics

Key Differences

Compare Tempo and Thanos across features, pricing, integrations, and community metrics. Tempo / Thanos.

Feature

Tempo

Monitoring

Thanos

Monitoring

Side-by-side comparison of developer tools
Distributed tracing backend
Highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities
GitHub Stars
⭐ 5,232
⭐ 14,049
Contributors
👥 299
👥 721
Pricing
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
Languages
Go
Go
Features
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Grafana
  • • Cncf
  • • Go
  • • Google Cloud Storage
  • • Hacktoberfest
  • • High Availability
Integrations
  • • grafana
  • • aws
  • • prometheus
Momentum Score
89/100 (slowing)
66/100 (stable)
Community Health
30/100 (needs-attention)
73/100 (good)
Maturity Index
20/100 (experimental)
50/100 (emerging)
Innovation Score
13/100 (traditional)
65/100 (progressive)
Risk Score (higher is safer)
29/100 (high)
62/100 (low)
Developer Experience
16/100 (poor)
54/100 (needs-improvement)
Links
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub

Tempo Strengths

Thanos Strengths

  • ✓ More popular (14,049 stars)
  • ✓ Larger community (721 contributors)
  • ✓ More features (5 listed)

When to Use Tempo vs Thanos

Use Tempo when its strengths align better with your stack and team needs, and choose Thanos when its ecosystem, integrations, or cost profile is a better fit.

Related comparisons

Tempo vs Grafana → Thanos vs Grafana → Tempo vs Prometheus → Thanos vs Prometheus → Tempo vs Loki → Thanos vs Loki → Tempo vs Jaeger → Thanos vs Jaeger → Tempo vs Zipkin → Thanos vs Zipkin → Tempo vs VictoriaMetrics → Thanos vs VictoriaMetrics →

More Comparisons

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Data source: GitHub API

Last updated: 5/4/2026