head to head · open source
Prometheus vs InfluxDB
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. InfluxDB has 31,797 stars, 3,857 forks, 2,165 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 110% (66,906 vs 31,797 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; InfluxDB is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, InfluxDB 12%. Prometheus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (metrics, monitoring, time-series), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Prometheus | InfluxDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 3.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Prometheus if
- You weight community size — 67K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick InfluxDB if
- You want the InfluxDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and InfluxDB fits your workflow better
About Prometheus
Prometheus Visit prometheus.io for the full documentation, examples and guides. [ ][quay] [ ][hub] Prometheus, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts when specified conditions are observed. The features that distinguish Prometheus from other metrics and monitoring systems are: A multi dimensional data model (time series defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions) PromQL, a powerful and flexible query language to…
read the full Prometheus overview →
About InfluxDB
InfluxDB 3 Core Open source time series database for real time events, analytics, and monitoring powered by Apache Arrow, DataFusion, and Parquet. InfluxDB 3 Core is a database built to collect, process, transform, and store event and time series data. It is ideal for use cases that require real time ingest and fast query response times to build user interfaces, monitoring, and automation solutions. Common use cases include: Monitoring sensor data Server monitoring Application performance monitoring Network monitoring Financial market and trading analytics Behavioral analytics InfluxDB is optimized for scenarios…
read the full InfluxDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or InfluxDB more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and InfluxDB has 31,797. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and InfluxDB free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and InfluxDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and InfluxDB?
Prometheus is written in Go and InfluxDB in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Prometheus or InfluxDB?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose InfluxDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.