head to head · open source
Prometheus vs spicedb
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. spicedb has 7,186 stars, 438 forks, 157 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 831% (66,906 vs 7,186 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; spicedb is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, spicedb 6%. 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 | spicedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 7.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 438 |
| 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 spicedb if
- You want the spicedb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and spicedb 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 spicedb
SpiceDB sets the standard for authorization that scales . Scale with Traffic • Dev Velocity • Functionality • Geography What is SpiceDB? SpiceDB is the most mature open source project inspired by Google's internal authorization system: [Zanzibar]. As of 2021, [broken access control became the 1 threat to web security according to OWASP][owasp]. With SpiceDB, platform and product teams can be be protected by answering this question easily: "can subject X perform action Y on resource Z?" Similar to a relational database, developers define a schema , write data in the form of relationships , and then use SpiceDB's…
read the full spicedb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or spicedb more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and spicedb has 7,186. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and spicedb free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and spicedb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and spicedb?
Prometheus is written in Go and spicedb 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 spicedb?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose spicedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.