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Thanos vs Alopex Skulk
Thanos components such as the sidecar, store gateway and compactor, and long-term storage on object storage, compared with Alopex Skulk.
Updated: Oct 13, 2026
What Thanos is
Thanos is a set of components that adds high availability and long-term storage to a Prometheus setup. Each component fulfils one specific role.
How it works
- Sidecar: connects to Prometheus, reads its data for queries and uploads it to cloud storage.
- Store gateway and compactor: the store gateway serves metrics inside a bucket, and the compactor compacts, downsamples and applies retention to the bucket data.
- Querier: implements the Prometheus API and aggregates data from the components below it.
Main features
- Long-term storage on object storage.
- A global query view through the Prometheus API.
- A receiver for Prometheus remote write and a ruler that evaluates rules.
Limits
Thanos is operated by combining components such as the sidecar, store gateway, compactor and querier on top of Prometheus. The compactor must run as a singleton against a bucket.
How it differs from Alopex Skulk
Both store Prometheus data and query it with PromQL.
Alopex Skulk is a time-series engine that runs embedded in your application. Start small embedded, then move on the same engine to a server with Prometheus-compatible endpoints and a cluster that scales out with sharding and replication. It queries time series with PromQL and SQL and stores them in time-partitioned, columnar Parquet files. Without a Prometheus in the picture, ingestion through querying happens inside the application, and the same engine grows to a cluster with your scale.
We recommend Alopex Skulk for storing and reading metrics just by embedding it in your application, with no components to assemble. Try it from the Alopex Skulk page.