head to head · open source
Prometheus vs tbls
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tbls has 4,372 stars, 216 forks, 55 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 1,430% (66,906 vs 4,372 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tbls is written in Go under MIT. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, tbls 5%. Prometheus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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 | tbls | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 4.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 216 |
| 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 tbls if
- You want the tbls feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tbls 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 tbls
tbls (pronounced /ˈteɪbl̩z/) is a CI Friendly tool to document a database, written in Go. Key features of tbls are: Document a database automatically in GFM format. Output database schema in many formats. Single binary = CI Friendly. Support many databases. Work as linter for database Table of Contents Quick Start Install Getting Started Document a database Diff database and (document or database) Lint a database Measure document coverage Continuous Integration Configuration Name Description Labels DSN Support Datasource Document path Document format ER diagram Filter tables Lint Comments Relations Viewpoints…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or tbls more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and tbls has 4,372. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and tbls free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tbls under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and tbls?
Prometheus is written in Go and tbls 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 tbls?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tbls if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.