Graphite vs Prometheus
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Graphite
Scalable real-time graphing and time series storage
VS
Prometheus
Metrics-based monitoring and alerting toolkit
| Feature | Graphite | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | ≈5-minute setup |
| Health score | 72 · Good | 100 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | JavaScript | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal, source | docker, binary, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 6,119 | ★ 66,196 |
| First released | 2008 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog | Datadog |
What are Graphite and Prometheus?
Graphite
Graphite is a monitoring tool that stores numeric time series data and renders graphs of it on demand. It consists of Carbon for metric ingestion, Whisper for storage, and a Django-based web app for visualization.
- Time series storage with Whisper
- On-demand graph rendering
- Plain-text metric protocol
- Widely supported by collectors
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
Graphite vs Prometheus: key differences
Graphite is written in JavaScript, while Prometheus is built with Go. Graphite is the more established project (first released 2008), while Prometheus arrived in 2015. Prometheus has the considerably larger community, at 66,196 GitHub stars versus 6,119.
Why pick each one
Choose Graphite if…
- Simple metric protocol
- Mature and stable
Watch out for
- Dated architecture
- Scaling requires extra components
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 Graphite or Prometheus better?
Neither is universally better. Prometheus has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Graphite and Prometheus free and open-source?
Yes. Graphite is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Prometheus under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Graphite and Prometheus with Docker?
Graphite: yes. Prometheus: yes.