# KairosDB vs Prometheus

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Prometheus

| Attribute | KairosDB | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 29.5 (55% (medium)) | 66.8 (57% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 0 | 100 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 32 | 5,467 |
| adoption.github_stars | 1,761 | 66,366 |
| adoption.package_downloads_weekly | 3 | 11,748,542 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"Open-source time series database that leverages Cassandra for storage, providing REST and Graphite protocol support for data ingestion and retrieval, with built-in aggregation functions and extensible architecture via plugins. It is indexed under Time-Series Databases.","source":"https://kairosdb.github.io/","question":"What is KairosDB?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"KairosDB is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://kairosdb.github.io/","question":"Is KairosDB free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"KairosDB supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://kairosdb.github.io/","question":"What platforms does KairosDB support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. KairosDB can be deployed self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://kairosdb.github.io/","question":"Can KairosDB be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 3 integrations for KairosDB, including Cassandra, Graphite and Telnet. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://kairosdb.github.io/","question":"What does KairosDB integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. KairosDB is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb","question":"Is KairosDB open source?","confidence":0.67}]` | `[{"answer":"A systems monitoring platform that collects metrics from configured targets at regular intervals, evaluates alert rules using PromQL, and triggers notifications. It uses a dimensional data model with key-value labels for flexible metric analysis and dashboarding. It is indexed under Time-Series Databases.","source":"https://prometheus.io","question":"What is Prometheus?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Prometheus is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://prometheus.io","question":"Is Prometheus free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Prometheus supports Windows, macOS, Linux and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://prometheus.io","question":"What platforms does Prometheus support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Prometheus can be deployed on-premise and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://prometheus.io","question":"Can Prometheus be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 24 integrations for Prometheus, including Amazon SNS, Discord, incident.io, Jira, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, OpsGenie and PagerDuty, plus 16 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://prometheus.io","question":"What does Prometheus integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed GDPR for Prometheus. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Prometheus not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/security/","question":"What security certifications does Prometheus have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Yes. Prometheus is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus","question":"Is Prometheus open source?","confidence":0.99}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"self_hosted":true}` | `{"on_prem":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | 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. | 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. |
| features.capabilities | `{"clustering":"distributed","data_model":"metrics","deployment":"self_hosted","downsampling":"continuous_aggregates","ingest_model":"push","licence_class":"source_available","retention_ttl":"manual","query_language":"REST API, Graphite protocol","replication_ha":true,"high_cardinality":"strong","sql_compatibility":"non_sql"}` | `{"clustering":"distributed","data_model":"metrics","deployment":"self_hosted","compression":"XOR2 float chunk encoding","ingest_model":"both","licence_class":"permissive_oss","query_language":"PromQL","replication_ha":true,"high_cardinality":"strong","sql_compatibility":"non_sql","prometheus_remote_write":true}` |
| integrations.count | 3 | 60 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Cassandra"},{"name":"Graphite"},{"name":"Telnet"}]` | `[{"name":"Amazon SNS"},{"name":"Discord"},{"name":"incident.io"},{"name":"Jira"},{"name":"Mattermost"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"OpsGenie"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"Pushover"},{"name":"Rocket.Chat"},{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"Telegram"},{"name":"VictorOps"},{"name":"Webex"},{"name":"WeChat"},{"name":"Webhook"},{"name":"Email"},{"name":"WeChat Work","native":true,"category":"chat","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Blackbox Exporter","native":true,"category":"monitoring","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Consul","native":true,"category":"service_discovery","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Graphite","native":true,"category":"metrics_collection","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Memcached","native":true,"category":"metrics_collection","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"MySQL","native":true,"category":"metrics_collection","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Node Exporter","native":true,"category":"metrics_collection","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"StatsD","native":true,"category":"metrics_collection","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Grafana Mimir","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"Thanos","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"VictoriaMetrics","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"Splunk","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"New Relic","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"Sysdig Monitor","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"SignalFx","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"Wavefront","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"Instana","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"InfluxDB","category":"database"},{"name":"Elasticsearch","category":"database"},{"name":"CrateDB","category":"database"},{"name":"M3DB","category":"database"},{"name":"GreptimeDB","category":"database"},{"name":"OpenTSDB","category":"database"},{"name":"Cortex","category":"storage"},{"name":"AWS Timestream","category":"cloud"},{"name":"Azure Data Explorer","category":"cloud"},{"name":"Google BigQuery","category":"cloud"},{"name":"Google Cloud Spanner","category":"cloud"},{"name":"AppOptics","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"Kafka","category":"messaging"},{"name":"Kubernetes","native":true,"category":"infrastructure"},{"name":"Ansible Tower","category":"automation"},{"name":"All Quiet","category":"incident_management"},{"name":"Rootly","category":"incident_management"},{"name":"Parny","category":"incident_management"},{"name":"Better Uptime","category":"incident_management"},{"name":"Asana","category":"collaboration"},{"name":"Notion","category":"collaboration"},{"name":"Matrix","category":"chat"},{"name":"Zulip","category":"chat"},{"name":"AWS SNS","category":"notifications"},{"name":"Phabricator","category":"project_management"},{"name":"NetBox","category":"infrastructure"},{"name":"Fastly","category":"cdn"},{"name":"NS1","category":"dns"},{"name":"ElastiCache","category":"cloud"},{"name":"OpenObserve","category":"monitoring"},{"name":"Mezmo","category":"logging"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | Go |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| market.availability | - | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"linux":true}` | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"web":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","sourceUrl":"https://kairosdb.github.io/","retrievedAt":"2026-08-13T23:03:34.808Z"}` | `{"type":"open_source","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://prometheus.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T16:35:31.505Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | - | yes |
| pricing.model | open_source | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | free | free |
| pricing.transparent | - | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 92 | 7 |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.3.0","date":"2021-08-09T04:31:37Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.3.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.2.2","date":"2018-11-10T04:04:05Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.2.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.3.0-beta1","date":"2018-04-14T04:43:02Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v1.3.0-beta1"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.2.1","date":"2018-03-31T19:07:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.2.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.2.0","date":"2018-02-01T14:54:51Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.2.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.1.3","date":"2017-01-04T00:24:16Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.1.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.1.2","date":"2016-09-08T04:29:39Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.1.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.1.1","date":"2015-12-08T03:09:45Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.1.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.1.0","date":"2015-11-05T23:22:46Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.1.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v1.0.0","date":"2015-06-05T05:08:49Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v0.9.5beta2","date":"2015-04-03T13:25:15Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v0.9.5beta2"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v0.9.5beta1","date":"2015-01-26T20:29:20Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v0.9.5beta1"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v0.9.4","date":"2014-07-07T21:30:43Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.9.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v0.9.3","date":"2014-06-18T16:10:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.9.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb/releases/tag/v0.9.2","date":"2014-06-18T16:51:02Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.9.2"}]` | `[{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.13.4","date":"2026-10-02T14:46:21Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.13.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.15.0","date":"2026-09-25T08:56:22Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.15.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.15.0-rc.1","date":"2026-09-22T10:07:36Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v3.15.0-rc.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.15.0-rc.0","date":"2026-09-14T19:17:49Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v3.15.0-rc.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.13.3","date":"2026-09-07T14:18:03Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.13.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.14.0","date":"2026-08-18T08:49:40Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.14.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.14.0-rc.0","date":"2026-08-11T11:05:32Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v3.14.0-rc.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.13.2","date":"2026-07-30T13:25:26Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.13.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.13.1","date":"2026-07-10T10:34:15Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.13.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.5.5","date":"2026-07-09T08:41:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.5.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.13.0","date":"2026-07-01T14:09:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.13.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.13.0-rc.1","date":"2026-06-22T16:45:27Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v3.13.0-rc.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.13.0-rc.0","date":"2026-07-09T08:16:34Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v3.13.0-rc.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.5.4","date":"2026-06-17T15:14:04Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.5.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.12.0","date":"2026-05-28T17:40:13Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.12.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.12.0-rc.0","date":"2026-05-19T10:46:20Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v3.12.0-rc.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.11.3","date":"2026-04-27T15:56:23Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.11.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.5.3","date":"2026-04-27T14:55:57Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.5.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.11.2","date":"2026-04-13T15:17:52Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.11.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.5.2","date":"2026-04-13T15:17:26Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.5.2"}]` |
| reliability.status_page | yes | - |
| security.disclosure_policy | - | yes |
| security.gdpr | - | yes |
| security.scorecard | 3.4 | 8.1 |
| security.trust_center | - | https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/security/ |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":1,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=maven&package_name=org.kairosdb%3Akairosdb&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":"MODERATE"}` | `{"count":7,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=go&package_name=github.com%2Fprometheus%2Fprometheus&per_page=100","last_12m":4,"max_severity":"HIGH"}` |

## Capabilities (Time-Series Databases)

| Capability | KairosDB | Prometheus |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Query** |  |  |
| Query language (SQL / PromQL / InfluxQL-Flux / Graphite) | REST API, Graphite protocol | PromQL |
| SQL compatibility | Non-SQL | Non-SQL |
| **Ingest** |  |  |
| Ingest model | Push | Both |
| **Model** |  |  |
| Data model | Metrics (labels/tags) | Metrics (labels/tags) |
| **Lifecycle** |  |  |
| Downsampling / rollups | Continuous aggregates | - |
| Retention / TTL | Manual | - |
| **Storage** |  |  |
| Compression (columnar / delta / Gorilla) | - | XOR2 float chunk encoding |
| **Performance** |  |  |
| High-cardinality handling | Strong | Strong |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Clustering / horizontal scale | Distributed / sharded | Distributed / sharded |
| Replication / HA | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Self-hosted | Self-hosted |
| **Interop** |  |  |
| Prometheus remote-write compatible | - | ✓ |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Source-available | Permissive OSS |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T14:14:47.080Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*