head to head · open source
Prometheus vs Dragonfly
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Dragonfly has 31,844 stars, 1,295 forks, 308 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 110% (66,906 vs 31,844 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Dragonfly is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, Dragonfly 4%. Dragonfly 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 | Dragonfly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 Dragonfly if
- You want the Dragonfly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly
Before moving on, please consider giving us a GitHub star ⭐️. Thank you! Other languages: 简体中文 日本語 한국어 Português ภาษาไทย Website • Docs • Quick Start • Community Discord • Dragonfly User Conference • Join the Dragonfly Community GitHub Discussions • GitHub Issues • Contributing • AI Agents Guide • Dragonfly Cloud The world's most efficient in memory data store Dragonfly is an in memory data store built for modern application workloads. Fully compatible with Redis and Memcached APIs, Dragonfly requires no code changes to adopt. Compared to legacy in memory datastores, Dragonfly delivers 25X more throughput…
read the full Dragonfly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or Dragonfly more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and Dragonfly has 31,844. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and Dragonfly free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Dragonfly has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Prometheus and Dragonfly?
Prometheus is written in Go and Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Dragonfly if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.