head to head · open source
Prometheus vs rocksdb
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rocksdb has 32,241 stars, 7,006 forks, 1,645 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 108% (66,906 vs 32,241 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; rocksdb is written in C++ under GPL-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, rocksdb 22%. 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 | rocksdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 7.0K |
| 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 rocksdb if
- You want the rocksdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and rocksdb 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 rocksdb
RocksDB: A Persistent Key Value Store for Flash and RAM Storage RocksDB is developed and maintained by Facebook Database Engineering Team. It is built on earlier work on LevelDB by Sanjay Ghemawat (sanjay@google.com) and Jeff Dean (jeff@google.com) This code is a library that forms the core building block for a fast key value server, especially suited for storing data on flash drives. It has a Log Structured Merge Database (LSM) design with flexible tradeoffs between Write Amplification Factor (WAF), Read Amplification Factor (RAF) and Space Amplification Factor (SAF). It has multi threaded compactions, making…
read the full rocksdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or rocksdb more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and rocksdb has 32,241. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and rocksdb free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rocksdb under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and rocksdb?
Prometheus is written in Go and rocksdb in C++. 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 rocksdb?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rocksdb if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.