head to head · open source
Prometheus vs dbal
Prometheus has 66,109 GitHub stars, 10,839 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dbal has 9,707 stars, 1,377 forks, 304 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 581% (66,109 vs 9,707 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 | ★ 66K | ★ 9.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-12 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Prometheus if
- You weight community size — 66K 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 is an open source monitoring system and time series database, part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem. It collects metrics from configured targets at defined intervals, evaluates alerting rules, and visualizes results. Designed for reliability in dynamic environments, it operates without reliance on distributed storage, ensuring each server node functions independently.
read the full Prometheus overview →
About dbal
Doctrine DBAL is an MIT licensed PHP database abstraction layer, maintained as part of the Doctrine project, that provides one API for database schema introspection and schema management across IBM Db2, MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and SQLite — and it is aimed at PHP developers and teams that must write database code portable across those engines instead of hand writing driver specific SQL for each one.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or dbal more popular?
Prometheus has 66,109 GitHub stars and dbal has 9,707. 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 (66,109 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dbal if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.