head to head · open source
Prometheus vs Zabbix
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Zabbix has 6,529 stars, 1,275 forks, 108 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 925% (66,906 vs 6,529 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Zabbix is written in Go Template under AGPL-3.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, Zabbix 20%. Prometheus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (alerting, 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 | Zabbix | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go Template |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 Zabbix if
- You want the Zabbix feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go Template
- You evaluated both and Zabbix 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 Zabbix
An enterprise class, open source distributed monitoring solution that’s designed to monitor the performance and availability of network devices, servers, services, and other IT resources. Zabbix is a flexible solution that can monitor anything from a simple, standalone application to a large scale environment, with features including: Resource discovery: Discover network entities, server resources, and onboard/offboard devices. Use out of the box integrations (templates) to monitor anything form a low level device to a SAAS service. Metric acquisition: Use an agent or agent less approach for metric acquisition…
read the full Zabbix overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or Zabbix more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and Zabbix has 6,529. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and Zabbix free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Zabbix under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and Zabbix?
Prometheus is written in Go and Zabbix in Go Template. 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 Zabbix?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,906 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Zabbix if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.