head to head · open source
Prometheus vs martin
Prometheus has 66,109 GitHub stars, 10,839 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. martin has 3,925 stars, 388 forks, 52 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 1,584% (66,109 vs 3,925 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; martin is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, martin 10%. martin was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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.
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Side by side
| Prometheus | martin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 66K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 388 |
| 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 martin if
- You want the martin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and martin 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 martin
Martin is a Rust based tile server and toolkit from the MapLibre project that generates vector tiles on the fly from PostgreSQL/PostGIS databases and GeoJSON files, serves tiles from PMTiles, MBTiles and GeoParquet sources, and ships command line tooling for bulk tile generation and MBTiles maintenance, aimed at teams that self host map tiles under heavy traffic.
read the full martin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or martin more popular?
Prometheus has 66,109 GitHub stars and martin has 3,925. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and martin free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and martin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and martin?
Prometheus is written in Go and martin in Rust. 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 martin?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,109 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose martin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.