head to head · open source
worldmonitor vs cortex
worldmonitor has 90,021 GitHub stars, 13,905 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cortex has 5,877 stars, 882 forks, 343 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. worldmonitor leads on adoption by 1,432% (90,021 vs 5,877 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%. worldmonitor 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 | ★ 90K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 14K | ⑂ 882 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick worldmonitor if
- You weight community size — 90K 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 简体中文 日本語 Real time global intelligence dashboard — AI powered news aggregation, geopolitical monitoring, and infrastructure tracking in a unified situational awareness interface. Documentation · Releases · Contributing What It Does Curated news feeds across global and regional categories, AI synthesized into briefs Dual map engine — 3D globe (globe.gl) and WebGL flat map (deck.gl) with a shared map layer catalog Panel inventory — concrete panel implementations across specialized variants Cross stream correlation — military, economic, disaster, and escalation signal convergence Country Instability…
read the full worldmonitor overview →
About cortex
Cortex Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant, long term storage solution for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Metrics. Features Horizontally scalable: Cortex can run across multiple machines in a cluster, exceeding the throughput and storage of a single machine. Highly available: When run in a cluster, Cortex can replicate data between machines. Multi tenant: Cortex can isolate data and queries from multiple different independent Prometheus sources in a single cluster. Long term storage: Cortex supports S3, GCS, Swift and Microsoft Azure for long term storage of metric data. Documentation…
read the full cortex overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is worldmonitor or cortex more popular?
worldmonitor has 90,021 GitHub stars and cortex has 5,877. 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 (90,021 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.