Comparison

HashiCorp Vault vs Prometheus

No clear leader: HashiCorp Vault (69.9) and Prometheus (66.8) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.

Machine formatsMarkdownJSONGraphQLMarkdown is open. JSON and GraphQL need a free key.
HashiCorp Vault70
Prometheus67
Score
vioscaleAI score
HashiCorp Vault70 / 100medium · 73%
Prometheus67 / 100medium · 57%
Pricing
Free tier
HashiCorp Vault✓
Prometheus✓
Model
HashiCorp Vaultcommercial
Prometheusopen_source
Price level
HashiCorp Vaultfree
Prometheusfree
Transparent
HashiCorp Vault✓
Prometheus✓
Integrations
Count
HashiCorp Vault9
Prometheus60
Reliability
Status page
HashiCorp Vault✓
Prometheus–
Adoption
Dependent repos
HashiCorp Vault8,444
Prometheus5,467
Github stars
HashiCorp Vault36,339
Prometheus66,366
Package downloads weekly
HashiCorp Vault–
Prometheus11,748,542
Activity
Commits last 30d
HashiCorp Vault100
Prometheus100
Release
Cadence days
HashiCorp Vault22
Prometheus7
History
HashiCorp Vault20 items
Prometheus20 items
License
Spdx
HashiCorp Vault–
PrometheusApache-2.0
Language
Primary
HashiCorp VaultGo
PrometheusGo
Market
Availability
HashiCorp Vault–
Content
Faq
HashiCorp Vault6 items
Prometheus7 items

Features

The capabilities each product documents. These tools do not share a category taxonomy, so this aligns what each vendor states rather than a normalised feature set.

Declared feature comparison
FeatureHashiCorp VaultPrometheus
Audit logging✓-
Clustering-distributed
Compression-XOR2 float chunk encoding
Data model-metrics
Deployment-self_hosted
Dynamic secrets✓-
Encryption as a service✓-
Fine grained policy✓-
High cardinality-strong
Hostingboth-
Hsm support✓-
Ingest model-both
Licence class-permissive_oss
Open source core✓-
Pki ca✓-
Prometheus remote write-✓
Query language-PromQL
Replication ha-✓
Secret rotation✓-
Sql compatibility-non_sql
Tool typestore-

What each one is

The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.

HashiCorp Vault

A system for securely storing and controlling access to secrets like credentials, API keys, and certificates. It generates temporary credentials on-demand, automatically revokes expired secrets, and provides encryption without persistent storage, enabling applications to access secrets through a unified interface with comprehensive audit logging.

Independently observed

Prometheus

A pull-based monitoring platform that periodically scrapes metrics from instrumented targets over HTTP and stores them in a time-series database. It provides PromQL for querying metrics and integrates with Alertmanager for rule-based alerting and incident notifications.

Independently observed

Pricing

List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.

HashiCorp Vault

Open sourceFree tier
as of verify ↗

Prometheus

Open sourceFree tier
as of verify ↗

Platform & deployment

Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.

Platforms
Web
HashiCorp Vault✓
Prometheus✓
macOS
HashiCorp Vault✗
Prometheus✓
Windows
HashiCorp Vault✗
Prometheus✓
Linux
HashiCorp Vault✗
Prometheus✓
CLI
HashiCorp Vault✗
Prometheus✓
Deployment
Self-hosted
HashiCorp Vault✓
Prometheus✓
On-premise
HashiCorp Vault✗
Prometheus✓

Integrations

What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.

In common (1)
  • Consul

HashiCorp Vault

13 total - 12 not shared
  • AWS
  • SQL databases
  • OCI
  • Okta
  • Azure
  • GCP
  • Oracle Cloud
  • Nomad
  • LDAP
  • OpenLDAP
  • Duo
  • GCP Secret Manager
Independently observed

Prometheus

65 total - 64 not shared
  • Amazon SNS
  • Discord
  • incident.io
  • Jira
  • Mattermost
  • Microsoft Teams
  • OpsGenie
  • PagerDuty
  • Pushover
  • Rocket.Chat
  • Slack
  • Telegram
  • VictorOps
  • Webex
  • WeChat
  • Webhook
  • Email
  • WeChat Work
  • Blackbox Exporter
  • Graphite
  • Memcached
  • MySQL
  • Node Exporter
  • StatsD
  • +40 more
Independently observed
Still deciding?

HashiCorp Vault or Prometheus: which one depends on you

A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.

Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works

Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.