We consider an AdS/QCD model at finite temperature with a dilaton field that we call thermal because, in addition to depending on the holographic coordinate, it also depends on temperature. We study two thermal dilatons in this work such that at T = 0 they are reduced to the dilatons used by some authors. With these dilatons it is possible to obtain melting temperatures for mesons close to 180 MeV and also make predictions for other hadrons. We use a procedure based on the analysis of the holographic potential related to the E.O.M. for modes dual to hadrons to calculate melting temperatures. This technique is easy to implement, and it produces results close to the one obtained from a more rigorous working with spectral functions to calculate hadron melting temperatures; therefore, it could be considered a first fast testing criterion for soft wall-like models at finite temperature. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.