head to head · open source
Prometheus vs pony
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pony has 3,820 stars, 257 forks, 358 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 1,651% (66,906 vs 3,820 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; pony is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, pony 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 | pony | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 3.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 257 |
| 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 pony if
- You want the pony feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and pony 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 pony
Downloads Pony Object Relational Mapper ============================= Pony is an advanced object relational mapper. The most interesting feature of Pony is its ability to write queries to the database using Python generator expressions and lambdas. Pony analyzes the abstract syntax tree of the expression and translates it into a SQL query. Here is an example query in Pony: Pony translates queries to SQL using a specific database dialect. Currently Pony works with SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle databases. By providing a Pythonic API, Pony facilitates fast app development. Pony is an easy to learn and easy…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or pony more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and pony has 3,820. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and pony free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pony under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and pony?
Prometheus is written in Go and pony in Python. 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 pony?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pony if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.