head to head · open source
Prometheus vs Raphtory
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Raphtory has 650 stars, 70 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 10,193% (66,906 vs 650 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Raphtory is written in Rust under GPL-3.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, Raphtory 11%. Raphtory was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (time-series), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | Raphtory | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 650 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 70 |
| 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 Raphtory if
- You want the Raphtory feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Raphtory 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 Raphtory
🌍 Website   📒 Documentation   Pometry   🧙Tutorial   🐛 Report a Bug   Join Slack Raphtory is an in memory vectorised graph database written in Rust with friendly Python APIs on top. It is blazingly fast, scales to hundreds of millions of edges on your laptop, and can be dropped into your existing pipelines with a simple pip install raphtory . It can be ran embedded or as a server instance using GraphQL, supports time traveling, full text search, multilayer modelling, and advanced analytics beyond simple querying like automatic risk detection, dynamic scoring, and temporal motifs. With the…
read the full Raphtory overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or Raphtory more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and Raphtory has 650. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and Raphtory free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Raphtory under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and Raphtory?
Prometheus is written in Go and Raphtory in Rust. 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 Raphtory?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Raphtory if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.