head to head · open source
Prometheus vs kairosdb
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kairosdb has 1,759 stars, 342 forks, 141 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 3,704% (66,906 vs 1,759 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; kairosdb is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, kairosdb 19%. Prometheus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (metrics), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Prometheus | kairosdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-03-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 342 |
| 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 kairosdb if
- You want the kairosdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and kairosdb 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 kairosdb
KairosDB is a fast distributed scalable time series database written on top of Cassandra. Documentation Documentation is found here. Frequently Asked Questions Installing Download the latest KairosDB release. Installation instructions are found here If you want to test KairosDB in Kubernetes please follow the instructions from KairosDB Helm chart. Getting Involved Join the KairosDB discussion group. Contributing to KairosDB Contributions to KairosDB are very welcome . KairosDB is mainly developed in Java, but there's a lot of tasks for non Java programmers too, so don't feel shy and join us! What you can do for…
read the full kairosdb overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or kairosdb more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and kairosdb has 1,759. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and kairosdb free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and kairosdb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and kairosdb?
Prometheus is written in Go and kairosdb in Java. 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 kairosdb?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose kairosdb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.