# M3DB vs Prometheus

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Prometheus

| Attribute | M3DB | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 50.5 (51% (medium)) | 66.8 (57% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 50 | 100 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 10 | 5,467 |
| adoption.github_stars | 4,905 | 66,366 |
| adoption.package_downloads_weekly | - | 11,748,542 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"M3 is a metrics platform consisting of a distributed time-series database, query engine, and ingestion system designed to handle massive metric volumes efficiently. It provides Prometheus and Graphite compatibility while optimizing for performance and cost efficiency through purpose-built storage and querying components. It is indexed under Time-Series Databases.","source":"https://m3db.io","question":"What is M3DB?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"M3DB 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://m3db.io","question":"Is M3DB free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"M3DB supports a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://m3db.io","question":"What platforms does M3DB support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. M3DB can be deployed self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://m3db.io","question":"Can M3DB be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 4 integrations for M3DB, including Prometheus, Graphite, Kubernetes and Docker. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://m3db.io","question":"What does M3DB integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. M3DB 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/m3db/m3","question":"Is M3DB open source?","confidence":0.95}]` | `[{"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 | 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. | 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","compression":"columnar","downsampling":"retention_policies","ingest_model":"push","licence_class":"permissive_oss","retention_ttl":"automatic","query_language":"PromQL, Graphite","replication_ha":true,"high_cardinality":"strong","sql_compatibility":"non_sql","prometheus_remote_write":true}` | `{"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 | 4 | 60 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Prometheus"},{"name":"Graphite"},{"name":"Kubernetes"},{"name":"Docker"},{"name":"InfluxDB","native":true,"category":"metrics","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"etcd","native":true,"direction":"inbound"}]` | `[{"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 | Go | Go |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"web":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://m3db.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T08:30:20.373Z"}` | `{"type":"open_source","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://prometheus.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T16:35:31.505Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | open_source | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | free | free |
| pricing.transparent | yes | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 12 | 7 |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.6.0","date":"2026-09-25T21:06:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.5.0","date":"2022-04-07T21:38:08Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.4.2","date":"2022-01-19T19:13:33Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.4.1","date":"2021-11-20T18:35:50Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.4.0","date":"2021-11-19T23:14:19Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.3.0","date":"2021-10-10T12:38:36Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.3.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.2.0","date":"2021-09-18T16:49:39Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.2.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.1.0","date":"2021-02-03T16:58:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.1.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.0.0-rc.2","date":"2020-11-19T10:32:24Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.0.0-rc.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.0.0","date":"2020-11-16T16:36:58Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.0.0-rc.1","date":"2020-11-19T10:29:05Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.0.0-rc.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v1.0.0-rc.0","date":"2020-11-09T22:23:25Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.0.0-rc.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.17-hotfix.5","date":"2020-12-11T20:04:47Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.17-hotfix.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.17-hotfix.4","date":"2020-12-07T08:08:20Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.17-hotfix.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.17-hotfix.2","date":"2020-10-28T19:59:03Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.17-hotfix.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.17-hotfix.1","date":"2020-10-28T19:40:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.17-hotfix.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.17-hotfix.3","date":"2020-11-17T23:03:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.17-hotfix.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.17-hotfix.0","date":"2020-10-23T19:02:15Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.17-hotfix.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.17","date":"2020-10-08T14:27:35Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/m3db/m3/releases/tag/v0.15.16","date":"2020-10-02T06:41:52Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.16"}]` | `[{"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"}]` |
| 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":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=go&package_name=github.com%2Fm3db%2Fm3&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` | `{"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 | M3DB | Prometheus |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Query** |  |  |
| Query language (SQL / PromQL / InfluxQL-Flux / Graphite) | PromQL, Graphite | PromQL |
| SQL compatibility | Non-SQL | Non-SQL |
| **Ingest** |  |  |
| Ingest model | Push | Both |
| **Model** |  |  |
| Data model | Metrics (labels/tags) | Metrics (labels/tags) |
| **Lifecycle** |  |  |
| Downsampling / rollups | Retention policies | - |
| Retention / TTL | Automatic | - |
| **Storage** |  |  |
| Compression (columnar / delta / Gorilla) | columnar | 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 | Permissive OSS | Permissive OSS |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T19:22:02.274Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*