head to head · open source
Prometheus vs SlateDB
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SlateDB has 3,607 stars, 330 forks, 184 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 1,755% (66,906 vs 3,607 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; SlateDB is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, SlateDB 9%. 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 | SlateDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 330 |
| 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 SlateDB if
- You want the SlateDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and SlateDB 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 SlateDB
Introduction SlateDB is an embedded storage engine built as a log structured merge tree. Unlike traditional LSM tree storage engines, SlateDB writes data to object storage (S3, GCS, ABS, MinIO, Tigris, and so on). Leveraging object storage allows SlateDB to provide bottomless storage capacity, high durability, and easy replication. The trade off is that object storage has a higher latency and higher API cost than local disk. To mitigate high write API costs (PUTs), SlateDB batches writes. Rather than writing every put() call to object storage, MemTables are flushed periodically to object storage as a string…
read the full SlateDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or SlateDB more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and SlateDB has 3,607. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and SlateDB free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and SlateDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and SlateDB?
Prometheus is written in Go and SlateDB 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 SlateDB?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose SlateDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.