Comparison

M3DB 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.
M3DB51
★Prometheus67
Score
vioscaleAI score
M3DB51 / 100medium · 51%
Prometheus67 / 100medium · 57%
Pricing
Free tier
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
Model
Price level
M3DBfree
Prometheusfree
Transparent
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
Integrations
Count
M3DB4
Prometheus60
Adoption
Dependent repos
M3DB10
Prometheus5,467
Github stars
M3DB4,905
Prometheus66,366
Package downloads weekly
M3DB–
Prometheus11,748,542
Activity
Commits last 30d
M3DB50
Prometheus100
Release
Cadence days
M3DB12
Prometheus7
History
Prometheus20 items
License
Spdx
PrometheusApache-2.0
Language
Primary
M3DBGo
PrometheusGo
Market
Availability
Content
Faq
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)
M3DBPromQL, Graphite
PrometheusPromQL
SQL compatibility
M3DBNon-SQL
PrometheusNon-SQL
Ingest
Ingest model
M3DBPush
PrometheusBoth
Model
Data model
M3DBMetrics (labels/tags)
PrometheusMetrics (labels/tags)
Lifecycle
Downsampling / rollups
M3DBRetention policies
Prometheus-
Retention / TTL
M3DBAutomatic
Prometheus-
Storage
Compression (columnar / delta / Gorilla)
M3DBcolumnar
PrometheusXOR2 float chunk encoding
Performance
High-cardinality handling
M3DBStrong
PrometheusStrong
Scale
Clustering / horizontal scale
M3DBDistributed / sharded
PrometheusDistributed / sharded
Replication / HA
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
Deployment
Deployment
M3DBSelf-hosted
PrometheusSelf-hosted
Interop
Prometheus remote-write compatible
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
Licensing
Licence class
M3DBPermissive OSS
PrometheusPermissive OSS

What each one is

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

M3DB

M3 is a distributed time series database built for storing and querying high-volume metrics with multiple query languages. It can be deployed as a single node or multi-node cluster using Docker, Kubernetes, or binaries.

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.

M3DB

Open sourceFree tier
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
M3DB✗
Prometheus✓
macOS
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
Windows
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
Linux
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
CLI
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
Deployment
Self-hosted
M3DB✓
Prometheus✓
On-premise
M3DB✗
Prometheus✓

Integrations

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

In common (3)
  • Graphite
  • Kubernetes
  • InfluxDB

M3DB

6 total - 3 not shared
  • Prometheus
  • Docker
  • etcd
Independently observed

Prometheus

Leader
65 total - 62 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
  • +38 more
Independently observed
Still deciding?

M3DB 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.