head to head · open source
Prometheus vs postgres-operator
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. postgres-operator has 5,270 stars, 1,079 forks, 546 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 1,170% (66,906 vs 5,270 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; postgres-operator is written in Go under MIT. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, postgres-operator 20%. 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-operator | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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-operator if
- You want the postgres-operator feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and postgres-operator 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-operator
Postgres Operator The Postgres Operator delivers an easy to run highly available PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes (K8s) powered by Patroni. It is configured only through Postgres manifests (CRDs) to ease integration into automated CI/CD pipelines with no access to Kubernetes API directly, promoting infrastructure as code vs manual operations. Operator features Rolling updates on Postgres cluster changes, incl. quick minor version updates Live volume resize without pod restarts (AWS EBS, PVC) Database connection pooling with PGBouncer Support fast in place major version upgrade. Supports global upgrade of all…
read the full postgres-operator overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or postgres-operator more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and postgres-operator has 5,270. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and postgres-operator free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and postgres-operator under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and postgres-operator?
Prometheus is written in Go and postgres-operator in Go. 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-operator?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose postgres-operator if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.