head to head · open source
NetData vs Prometheus
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars, 6,717 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus has 66,906 stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NetData leads on adoption by 21% (81,255 vs 66,906 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Prometheus 16%. Prometheus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (alerting), 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
| NetData | Prometheus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 67K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 11K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NetData if
- You weight community size — 81K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Prometheus if
- You want the Prometheus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Prometheus fits your workflow better
About NetData
X Ray Vision for your infrastructure! Every Metric, Every Second. No BS. Visit our Home Page MENU: WHO WE ARE KEY FEATURES GETTING STARTED HOW IT WORKS FAQ DOCS COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTE LICENSE [!WARNING] People get addicted to Netdata. Once you use it on your systems, there's no going back. WHO WE ARE Netdata is an open source, real time infrastructure monitoring platform. Monitor, detect, and act across your entire infrastructure. Core Advantages: Instant Insights – With Netdata you can access per second metrics and visualizations. Zero Configuration – You can deploy immediately without complex setup. ML Powered –…
read the full NetData overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or Prometheus more popular?
NetData has 81,255 GitHub stars and Prometheus has 66,906. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and Prometheus free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Prometheus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and Prometheus?
NetData is written in Go and Prometheus in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, NetData or Prometheus?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (81,255 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Prometheus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.