head to head · open source
Prometheus vs orbitdb
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. orbitdb has 8,823 stars, 594 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 658% (66,906 vs 8,823 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; orbitdb is written in JavaScript under MIT. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, orbitdb 7%. 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 | orbitdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 8.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 594 |
| 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 orbitdb if
- You want the orbitdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and orbitdb 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 orbitdb
OrbitDB OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer to peer database . OrbitDB uses IPFS as its data storage and Libp2p Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It's an eventually consistent database that uses Merkle CRDTs for conflict free database writes and merges making OrbitDB an excellent choice for p2p and decentralized apps, blockchain applications and local first web applications. OrbitDB provides various types of databases for different data models and use cases: events : an immutable (append only) log with traversable history. Useful for "latest N" use cases or as a message queue. documents…
read the full orbitdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or orbitdb more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and orbitdb has 8,823. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and orbitdb free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and orbitdb under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and orbitdb?
Prometheus is written in Go and orbitdb in JavaScript. 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 orbitdb?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose orbitdb if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.