head to head · open source
Prometheus vs dbmate
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dbmate has 7,514 stars, 387 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 790% (66,906 vs 7,514 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; dbmate is written in Go under MIT. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, dbmate 5%. 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 | dbmate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 7.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 387 |
| 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 dbmate if
- You want the dbmate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and dbmate 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 dbmate
Dbmate Dbmate is a database migration tool that will keep your database schema in sync across multiple developers and your production servers. It is a standalone command line tool that can be used with Go, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, Rust, C++, or any other language or framework you are using to write database backed applications. This is especially helpful if you are writing multiple services in different languages, and want to maintain some sanity with consistent development tools. For a comparison between dbmate and other popular database schema migration tools, please see Alternatives. Table of Contents…
read the full dbmate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or dbmate more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and dbmate has 7,514. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and dbmate free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dbmate under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and dbmate?
Prometheus is written in Go and dbmate 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 dbmate?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dbmate if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.