Cortex vs Prometheus
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Cortex with
choose an app… Uptime Kuma Netdata Grafana Glances SigNoz InfluxDB Grafana k6 Grafana Loki Apache SkyWalking Beszel Kibana OpenObserve cAdvisor VictoriaMetrics Thanos HyperDX Coroot Hertzbeat Pulse Monitor Zabbix Graphite Grafana Mimir Monitoror Uptrace Chronograf
Compare Prometheus with
choose an app… Uptime Kuma Netdata Grafana Superset Metabase Portainer CE Umami PostHog CasaOS Glance What's Up Status Postiz Netron Glances Homepage SigNoz InfluxDB Grafana k6 Redash Grafana Loki Plausible Dashy Apache SkyWalking Beszel Dockge Jaeger Vector Matomo Kibana GoAccess OpenObserve Cube cAdvisor Telegraf VictoriaMetrics Zipkin Upptime Phlare Logstash Sampler Dashboard Thanos Druid Dozzle Pinpoint APM Unleash Node Exporter Fluentd OpenSearch Rybbit Gatus Grafana Pyroscope Homer Checkmate Healthchecks HyperDX Benphelps Homepage Heimdall Beszel Hub Alertmanager Graylog ntopng Scrutiny Fluent Bit Coroot OpenTelemetry Collector Hertzbeat Statup Status WatchYourLAN NetAlertX Pulse Monitor Zabbix Graphite Speedtest Tracker Blackbox Exporter Grafana Tempo Grafana Mimir Kener Parca LibreNMS Monitoror Errbit Uptrace mtail Grafana OnCall Redis Exporter Vmstat Exporter PostgreSQL Exporter Grafana Alloy collectd Pushgateway Robusta Cstate Karma Kafka Exporter MySQL Server Exporter Kapacitor Perses Checkmk Kuberhealthy Icinga 2 PHP Server Monitor SNMP Exporter Process Exporter Munin VictoriaLogs Elasticsearch Exporter Grafana Beyla Nagios Core NGINX Prometheus Exporter Statping-ng Bugsink Smokeping Vigil Cacti Mailrise Domain Locker Proxmox VE Exporter Oncall Peekaping OpenNMS Horizon Shinken ElastAlert 2 Grafana Faro Sensu Go Percona Monitoring and Management Icinga Web 2 Kuma Mieru JSON Exporter Smokeping Prober Argus Monitor Web PHP-FPM Exporter Cloudprober Ping Exporter Monika IPMI Exporter SQL Exporter smartctl Exporter Pandora FMS Community Thruk NetXMS Apache Exporter NUT Exporter Speedtest Exporter Monit Naemon Bytebot Watch Fail2Ban Webinterface Lunalytics Observium Phoenix Panel
Feature Cortex Prometheus Category Monitoring & Status Monitoring & Status License Apache-2.0 Apache-2.0 Language Go Go Setup difficulty Hard Medium Min. RAM 1,024 MB 512 MB Deployment docker, kubernetes, helm docker, binary, helm GitHub stars ★ 5,844 ★ 65,616 First released 2016 2015 Replaces Datadog, Grafana Cloud Datadog
Why pick each one
Choose Cortex if… Built for very large scale True multi-tenancy Cortex details Choose Prometheus if… Powerful query language Reliable and scalable Huge ecosystem Prometheus details
Frequently asked questions Is Cortex or Prometheus better? Prometheus is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Cortex if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Cortex and Prometheus free and open-source? Yes. Cortex is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Prometheus under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cortex and Prometheus with Docker? Cortex: yes. Prometheus: yes.