Middleware vs Thanos
Middleware
middleware.ioThanos
thanos.ioSide by side
| Figure | Middleware | Thanos |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.30/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.0 (#5) | 7.2 (#40) |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Vercel, databases, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Logstash, Fluentd and the OpenTelemetry Collector. | The integrations documentation describes StoreAPI connections, including Geras for OpenTSDB and a proxy for Prometheus remote read. |
| Retention | The pricing FAQ states that free tier data retention is 14 days, pay-as-you-go retention is 30 days, and custom contracts have custom retention rates. | Thanos can use object storage to retain metrics for unlimited time. |
| Security | Middleware says customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256. | Thanos uses TLS by default for object storage communication, but its security policy says local metrics are not encrypted by Thanos and its HTTP APIs lack authorization or TLS support. |
Plans
In their own words
Middleware
Middleware is a hybrid observability platform for detecting and resolving issues across infrastructure, application performance, and real-user monitoring. Its listed coverage includes infrastructure monitoring, logs, metrics, distributed tracing, database monitoring, synthetic monitoring, browser testing, and LLM observability. The AI SRE Agent and OpsAI capabilities include root cause analysis, automatic issue detection, faster issue solving, and automatic PR generation. The Free Forever plan costs nothing and includes up to 100GB of data, 1k RUM sessions, 20k synthetic checks, 10 browser test runs, and 2 million OpsAI tokens, with 14-day retention and community support. Pay As You Go costs $0.30 a month, billed according to use, with default 30-day retention. Middleware lists 450+ integrations and a Public API. It runs on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, Windows, and API. The company says it encrypts customer data in transit and at rest using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256.