head to head · open source
Prometheus vs TDengine
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. TDengine has 25,183 stars, 5,013 forks, 434 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 166% (66,906 vs 25,183 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; TDengine is written in C under AGPL-3.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, TDengine 20%. Prometheus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (metrics, monitoring), 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 | TDengine | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 25K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 5.0K |
| 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 TDengine if
- You want the TDengine feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and TDengine 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 TDengine
English 简体中文 日本語 TDengine Cloud Documentation Learn more about TSDB TDengine 1. Introduction TDengine is an open source, high performance, cloud native and AI powered time series database designed for Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Cars, and Industrial IoT. It enables efficient, real time data ingestion, processing, and analysis of TB and even PB scale data per day, generated by billions of sensors and data collectors. TDengine differentiates itself from other time series databases with the following advantages: High Performance : TDengine is the only time series database to solve the high cardinality issue…
read the full TDengine overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or TDengine more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and TDengine has 25,183. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and TDengine free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and TDengine under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and TDengine?
Prometheus is written in Go and TDengine 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 TDengine?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose TDengine if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.