head to head · open source
Prometheus vs crystal
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crystal has 12,936 stars, 632 forks, 169 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 417% (66,906 vs 12,936 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; crystal is written in TypeScript under MIT. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, crystal 5%. crystal 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 | crystal | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 632 |
| 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 crystal if
- You want the crystal feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crystal 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 crystal
🔮 Graphile's Crystal Monorepo At Graphile we love GraphQL so much we named ourself for our love of it! This repository houses many of the Graphile packages that relate to GraphQL (or relate to the packages that relate to GraphQL, or relate to those package...); the two headline projects are Gra fast and PostGraphile but there's many other packages, a fair few of which can be used independently see below for more details. [Grafast][grafast] : A cutting edge planning and execution engine for GraphQL.js ─ use this as a drop in replacement for the execute method from GraphQL.js and by moving from traditional…
read the full crystal overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or crystal more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and crystal has 12,936. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and crystal free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crystal under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and crystal?
Prometheus is written in Go and crystal in TypeScript. 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 crystal?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crystal if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.