Cortex vs Grafana Mimir
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Grafana Mimir
Scalable long-term storage for Prometheus metrics
| Feature | Cortex | Grafana Mimir |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 90 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, kubernetes, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,865 | ★ 5,238 |
| First released | 2016 | 2022 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Grafana Cloud | Datadog, Chronosphere |
What are Cortex and Grafana Mimir?
Cortex
Cortex provides a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term store for Prometheus metrics. It offers a single API endpoint for querying and writing time series data across clusters.
- Multi-tenant metrics storage
- Horizontally scalable
- Prometheus-compatible API
- Long-term retention
Grafana Mimir
Grafana Mimir is an open-source, horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant time series database for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It is designed to store and query hundreds of millions of active series.
- Massive cardinality support
- Multi-tenant by design
- Fast query engine
- Object storage backend
Cortex vs Grafana Mimir: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Cortex versus AGPL-3.0 for Grafana Mimir. Cortex is the more established project (first released 2016), while Grafana Mimir arrived in 2022.
Why pick each one
Choose Cortex if…
- Built for very large scale
- True multi-tenancy
Watch out for
- Operationally heavy
- Overkill for small setups
Choose Grafana Mimir if…
- Proven at billion-series scale
- Easier to operate than Cortex
Watch out for
- Resource intensive
- Complex for small homelabs
Frequently asked questions
Is Cortex or Grafana Mimir better?
Neither is universally better. Cortex has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Cortex and Grafana Mimir free and open-source?
Yes. Cortex is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Grafana Mimir under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cortex and Grafana Mimir with Docker?
Cortex: yes. Grafana Mimir: yes.