head to head · open source
Prometheus vs toydb
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. toydb has 7,302 stars, 625 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Prometheus leads on adoption by 816% (66,906 vs 7,302 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; toydb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, toydb 9%. 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 | toydb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 7.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 625 |
| 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 toydb if
- You want the toydb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and toydb 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 toydb
toyDB Distributed SQL database in Rust, built from scratch as an educational project. Main features: [Raft distributed consensus][raft] for linearizable state machine replication. [ACID transactions][txn] with MVCC based snapshot isolation. [Pluggable storage engine][storage] with [BitCask][bitcask] and [in memory][memory] backends. [Iterator based query engine][query] with [heuristic optimization][optimizer] and time travel support. [SQL interface][sql] including joins, aggregates, and transactions. toyDB is intended to be simple and understandable, and also functional and correct. Other aspects like…
read the full toydb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or toydb more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and toydb has 7,302. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and toydb free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and toydb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and toydb?
Prometheus is written in Go and toydb in Rust. 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 toydb?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose toydb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.