head to head · open source
Prometheus vs citus
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. citus has 12,840 stars, 805 forks, 1,075 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 421% (66,906 vs 12,840 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; citus is written in C under AGPL-3.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, citus 6%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Prometheus | citus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 805 |
| 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 citus if
- You want the citus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and citus 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 citus
What is Citus? Citus is a PostgreSQL extension that transforms Postgres into a distributed database—so you can achieve high performance at any scale. With Citus, you extend your PostgreSQL database with new superpowers: Distributed tables are sharded across a cluster of PostgreSQL nodes to combine their CPU, memory, storage and I/O capacity. Reference tables are replicated to all nodes for joins and foreign keys from distributed tables and to maximize read performance. Distributed query engine routes and parallelizes SELECT, DML, and other operations on distributed tables across the cluster. Columnar storage…
read the full citus overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or citus more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and citus has 12,840. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and citus free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and citus under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and citus?
Prometheus is written in Go and citus in C. 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 citus?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose citus if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.