Cortex vs Pushgateway
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Cortex | Pushgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 87 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 32 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,865 | ★ 3,369 |
| First released | 2016 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Grafana Cloud | Datadog |
What are Cortex and Pushgateway?
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
Pushgateway
The Prometheus Pushgateway allows ephemeral and batch jobs to expose their metrics to Prometheus. Jobs push metrics to the gateway, which Prometheus then scrapes on its regular schedule.
- Accepts pushed metrics
- Bridges batch jobs to Prometheus
- Persists metrics to disk
- Tiny footprint
Cortex vs Pushgateway: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. Pushgateway is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 1,024 MB for Cortex.
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 Pushgateway if…
- Solves batch job monitoring
- Simple to run
Watch out for
- Not for high-frequency metrics
- Can become a single point of failure
Frequently asked questions
Is Cortex or Pushgateway better?
Neither is universally better. Cortex has the larger community, while Pushgateway is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Cortex and Pushgateway free and open-source?
Yes. Cortex is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Pushgateway under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cortex and Pushgateway with Docker?
Cortex: yes. Pushgateway: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Cortex or Pushgateway?
Pushgateway has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 1,024 MB for Cortex. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.