head to head · open source
Prometheus vs valkey
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey has 27,583 stars, 1,540 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 143% (66,906 vs 27,583 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, valkey 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 | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 28K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 valkey if
- You want the valkey feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and valkey 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 valkey
This project was forked from the open source Redis project right before the transition to their new source available licenses. This README is just a fast quick start document. More details can be found under valkey.io What is Valkey? Valkey is a high performance data structure server that primarily serves key/value workloads. It supports a wide range of native structures and an extensible plugin system for adding new data structures and access patterns. Building Valkey using Makefile Valkey can be compiled and used on Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD. We support big endian and little endian architectures…
read the full valkey overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or valkey more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,583. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and valkey free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and valkey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and valkey?
Prometheus is written in Go and valkey 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 valkey?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose valkey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.