head to head · open source
Prometheus vs badger
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. badger has 15,797 stars, 1,341 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 14 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 324% (66,906 vs 15,797 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; badger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, badger 8%. Prometheus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | badger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 badger if
- You want the badger 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 badger 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 badger
BadgerDB BadgerDB is an embeddable, persistent and fast key value (KV) database written in pure Go. It is the underlying database for Dgraph, a fast, distributed graph database. It's meant to be a performant alternative to non Go based key value stores like RocksDB. Project Status Badger is stable and is being used to serve data sets worth hundreds of terabytes. Badger supports concurrent ACID transactions with serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) guarantees. A Jepsen style bank test runs nightly for 8h, with race flag and ensures the maintenance of transactional guarantees. Badger has also been tested to work…
read the full badger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or badger more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and badger has 15,797. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and badger free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and badger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and badger?
Prometheus is written in Go and badger 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, Prometheus or badger?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose badger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.