head to head · open source
Prometheus vs q
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. q has 10,361 stars, 425 forks, 132 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 546% (66,906 vs 10,361 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; q is written in Python under GPL-3.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, q 4%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Prometheus | q | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 10K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-02-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 425 |
| 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 q if
- You want the q feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and q 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 q
q Text as Data q's purpose is to bring SQL expressive power to the Linux command line and to provide easy access to text as actual data. q allows the following: Performing SQL like statements directly on tabular text data, auto caching the data in order to accelerate additional querying on the same file. Performing SQL statements directly on multi file sqlite3 databases, without having to merge them or load them into memory The following table shows the impact of using caching: Notice that for the current version, caching is not enabled by default, since the caches take disk space. Use C readwrite or C read to…
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or q more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and q has 10,361. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and q free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and q under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and q?
Prometheus is written in Go and q 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 q?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose q if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.