Comparison

KairosDB vs Prometheus

On the evidence we track, Prometheus leads this comparison with a composite score of 67/100. Scores are only directly comparable because these tools share a category; the full breakdown and every source is below.

Machine formatsMarkdownJSONGraphQLMarkdown is open. JSON and GraphQL need a free key.
KairosDB30
★Prometheus67
Score
vioscaleAI score
KairosDB30 / 100medium · 55%
Prometheus67 / 100medium · 57%
Pricing
Free tier
KairosDB–
Prometheus✓
Model
KairosDBopen_source
Prometheusopen_source
Price level
KairosDBfree
Prometheusfree
Transparent
KairosDB–
Prometheus✓
Integrations
Count
KairosDB3
Prometheus60
Reliability
Status page
KairosDB✓
Prometheus–
Adoption
Dependent repos
KairosDB32
Prometheus5,467
Github stars
KairosDB1,761
Prometheus66,366
Package downloads weekly
KairosDB3
Prometheus11,748,542
Activity
Commits last 30d
KairosDB0
Prometheus100
Release
Cadence days
KairosDB92
Prometheus7
History
KairosDB15 items
Prometheus20 items
License
Spdx
KairosDBApache-2.0
PrometheusApache-2.0
Language
Primary
KairosDBJava
PrometheusGo
Market
Availability
KairosDB–
Content
Faq
KairosDB6 items
Prometheus7 items

Capabilities

Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for time-series databases. “-” means undocumented, not absent.

Query
Query language (SQL / PromQL / InfluxQL-Flux / Graphite)
KairosDBREST API, Graphite protocol
PrometheusPromQL
SQL compatibility
KairosDBNon-SQL
PrometheusNon-SQL
Ingest
Ingest model
KairosDBPush
PrometheusBoth
Model
Data model
KairosDBMetrics (labels/tags)
PrometheusMetrics (labels/tags)
Lifecycle
Downsampling / rollups
KairosDBContinuous aggregates
Prometheus-
Retention / TTL
KairosDBManual
Prometheus-
Storage
Compression (columnar / delta / Gorilla)
KairosDB-
PrometheusXOR2 float chunk encoding
Performance
High-cardinality handling
KairosDBStrong
PrometheusStrong
Scale
Clustering / horizontal scale
KairosDBDistributed / sharded
PrometheusDistributed / sharded
Replication / HA
KairosDB✓
Prometheus✓
Deployment
Deployment
KairosDBSelf-hosted
PrometheusSelf-hosted
Interop
Prometheus remote-write compatible
KairosDB-
Prometheus✓
Licensing
Licence class
KairosDBSource-available
PrometheusPermissive OSS

What each one is

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

KairosDB

KairosDB is a time series database built on Cassandra that supports multiple cluster architectures with separated read and write paths, allowing efficient data management across distributed systems.

Independently observed

Prometheus

Leader

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.

KairosDB

Open source
as of verify ↗

Prometheus

Leader
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
KairosDB✗
Prometheus✓
macOS
KairosDB✗
Prometheus✓
Windows
KairosDB✗
Prometheus✓
Linux
KairosDB✓
Prometheus✓
CLI
KairosDB✗
Prometheus✓
Deployment
Self-hosted
KairosDB✓
Prometheus✓
On-premise
KairosDB✗
Prometheus✓

Integrations

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

In common (1)
  • Graphite

KairosDB

3 total - 2 not shared
  • Cassandra
  • Telnet
Independently observed

Prometheus

Leader
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
  • Consul
  • Memcached
  • MySQL
  • Node Exporter
  • StatsD
  • +40 more
Independently observed
Still deciding?

KairosDB 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.