head to head · open source
worldmonitor vs cortex
worldmonitor has 86,752 GitHub stars, 13,161 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped today. cortex has 5,863 stars, 877 forks, 343 open issues and last shipped today. worldmonitor leads on adoption by 1,380% (86,752 vs 5,863 stars). worldmonitor is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; cortex is written in Go under Apache-2.0. worldmonitor has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, cortex 15%. cortex was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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
| worldmonitor | cortex | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 13K | ⑂ 877 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick worldmonitor if
- You weight community size — 87K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cortex if
- You want the cortex feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cortex fits your workflow better
About worldmonitor
World Monitor is an open source, real time global intelligence dashboard in TypeScript that aggregates news with AI, monitors geopolitics and infrastructure, and unifies all of it into a single situational awareness interface for analysts, journalists, researchers, and operations teams who need cross domain awareness they can self host.
read the full worldmonitor overview →
About cortex
Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant, long term storage backend for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Metrics, aimed at platform and observability teams whose metrics workload has outgrown a single Prometheus server.
read the full cortex overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is worldmonitor or cortex more popular?
worldmonitor has 86,752 GitHub stars and cortex has 5,863. worldmonitor has the larger community by that measure.
Are worldmonitor and cortex free?
Both are open source. worldmonitor is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cortex under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between worldmonitor and cortex?
worldmonitor is written in TypeScript and cortex 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, worldmonitor or cortex?
Choose worldmonitor if you want the larger community (86,752 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cortex if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.