head to head · open source
Prometheus vs dbal
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dbal has 9,701 stars, 1,376 forks, 304 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 590% (66,906 vs 9,701 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; dbal is written in PHP under MIT. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, dbal 14%. 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 | dbal | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 9.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 dbal if
- You want the dbal feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and dbal 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 dbal
Doctrine DBAL Powerful D ata B ase A bstraction L ayer with many features for database schema introspection and schema management. More resources: Website Documentation Issue Tracker [Coverage 5.0 image]: [5.0]: [CodeCov 5.0]: [GA 5.0]: [GA 5.0 image]: [Coverage 4.5 image]: [4.5]: [CodeCov 4.5]: [GA 4.5]: [GA 4.5 image]: [Coverage 4.4 image]: [4.4]: [CodeCov 4.4]: [GA 4.4]: [GA 4.4 image]: [Coverage 3.10 image]: [3.10]: [CodeCov 3.10]: [GA 3.10]: [GA 3.10 image]:
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or dbal more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and dbal has 9,701. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and dbal free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dbal under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and dbal?
Prometheus is written in Go and dbal in PHP. 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 dbal?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dbal if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.