cAdvisor vs Prometheus
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
cAdvisor
Container resource usage and performance analysis
VS
Prometheus
Metrics-based monitoring and alerting toolkit
| Feature | cAdvisor | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | ≈5-minute setup |
| Health score | 96 · Excellent | 100 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | docker, binary, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 19,439 | ★ 66,181 |
| First released | 2014 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog | Datadog |
What are cAdvisor and Prometheus?
cAdvisor
cAdvisor provides container users with an understanding of the resource usage and performance characteristics of their running containers. It exposes per-container CPU, memory, network, and filesystem metrics.
- Per-container resource metrics
- Live web UI
- Prometheus metrics export
- Auto-discovers containers
Prometheus
Prometheus is a metrics-based monitoring system and time-series database with a powerful query language and alerting. It targets engineers monitoring cloud-native infrastructure. It is deployed via Docker, binaries, or Helm.
- Pull-based metrics collection
- PromQL query language
- Built-in alerting rules
- Cloud-native standard
cAdvisor vs Prometheus: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. CAdvisor is the lighter option, starting around 64 MB of RAM against 512 MB for Prometheus. Prometheus has the considerably larger community, at 66,181 GitHub stars versus 19,439.
Why pick each one
Choose cAdvisor if…
- Zero configuration
- Lightweight
Watch out for
- Limited historical retention
- Best paired with Prometheus
Choose Prometheus if…
- Powerful query language
- Reliable and scalable
- Huge ecosystem
Watch out for
- No long-term storage by default
- Dashboards need Grafana
Frequently asked questions
Is cAdvisor or Prometheus better?
Neither is universally better. Prometheus has the larger community, while cAdvisor is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are cAdvisor and Prometheus free and open-source?
Yes. cAdvisor is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Prometheus under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run cAdvisor and Prometheus with Docker?
cAdvisor: yes. Prometheus: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, cAdvisor or Prometheus?
cAdvisor has the smaller minimum footprint at 64 MB of RAM, compared to about 512 MB for Prometheus. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.