head to head · open source
Prometheus vs TimescaleDb
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. TimescaleDb has 23,788 stars, 1,184 forks, 389 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 181% (66,906 vs 23,788 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; TimescaleDb is written in C under a custom or non-standard licence. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, TimescaleDb 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 (time-series), 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 | TimescaleDb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 24K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 TimescaleDb if
- You want the TimescaleDb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and TimescaleDb 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 TimescaleDb
TimescaleDB is a PostgreSQL extension for high performance real time analytics on time series and event data Quick Start with TimescaleDB Get started with TimescaleDB in under 10 minutes. This guide will help you run TimescaleDB locally, create your first hypertable with columnstore enabled, write data to the columnstore, and see instant analytical query performance. What You'll Learn How to run TimescaleDB with a one line install or Docker command How to create a hypertable with columnstore enabled How to insert data directly to the columnstore How to execute analytical queries Prerequisites Docker installed on…
read the full TimescaleDb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or TimescaleDb more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and TimescaleDb has 23,788. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and TimescaleDb free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and TimescaleDb has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Prometheus and TimescaleDb?
Prometheus is written in Go and TimescaleDb 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 TimescaleDb?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose TimescaleDb if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.