head to head · open source
Prometheus vs tile38
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tile38 has 9,753 stars, 624 forks, 163 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 586% (66,906 vs 9,753 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tile38 is written in Go under MIT. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, tile38 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 | tile38 | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 9.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 624 |
| 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 tile38 if
- You want the tile38 feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tile38 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 tile38
Tile38 is an open source (MIT licensed), in memory geolocation data store, spatial index, and realtime geofencing server. It supports a variety of object types including lat/lon points, bounding boxes, XYZ tiles, Geohashes, and GeoJSON. This README is quick start document. You can find detailed documentation at . Features Spatial index with search methods such as Nearby, Within, and Intersects. Realtime geofencing through webhooks or pub/sub channels. Object types of lat/lon, bbox, Geohash, GeoJSON, QuadKey, and XYZ tile. Support for lots of Clients Libraries written in many different languages. Variety of…
read the full tile38 overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or tile38 more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and tile38 has 9,753. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and tile38 free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tile38 under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and tile38?
Prometheus is written in Go and tile38 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 tile38?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tile38 if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.