head to head · open source
Prometheus vs postgres
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. postgres has 8,745 stars, 402 forks, 303 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 665% (66,906 vs 8,745 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; postgres is written in JavaScript under Unlicense. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, postgres 5%. 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 | postgres | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 8.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Unlicense |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 402 |
| 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 postgres if
- You want the postgres feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Unlicense license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and postgres 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 postgres
🚀 Fastest full featured node & deno client 🏷 ES6 Tagged Template Strings at the core 🏄♀️ Simple surface API 🖊️ Dynamic query support 💬 Chat and help on Gitter 🐦 Follow on Twitter Getting started Installation Usage Create your sql database instance Simply import for use elsewhere ESM dynamic imports The library can be used with ESM dynamic imports as well as shown here. Table of Contents Connection Queries Building queries Advanced query methods Transactions Data Transformation Listen & notify Realtime subscribe Numbers, bigint, numeric Result Array Connection details Custom Types Teardown / Cleanup Error…
read the full postgres overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or postgres more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and postgres has 8,745. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and postgres free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and postgres under Unlicense. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and postgres?
Prometheus is written in Go and postgres 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 postgres?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose postgres if its feature set, stack or Unlicense licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.