Grafana Mimir vs Pushgateway
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
VS
Pushgateway
Push acceptor for ephemeral and batch job metrics
| Feature | Grafana Mimir | Pushgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 87 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | 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 | ★ 5,238 | ★ 3,369 |
| First released | 2022 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Chronosphere | Datadog |
What are Grafana Mimir and Pushgateway?
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
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
Grafana Mimir vs Pushgateway: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana Mimir versus Apache-2.0 for Pushgateway. Pushgateway is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 1,024 MB for Grafana Mimir. Pushgateway is the more established project (first released 2015), while Grafana Mimir arrived in 2022.
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana Mimir if…
- Proven at billion-series scale
- Easier to operate than Cortex
Watch out for
- Resource intensive
- Complex for small homelabs
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 Grafana Mimir or Pushgateway better?
Neither is universally better. Grafana Mimir 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 Grafana Mimir and Pushgateway free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana Mimir is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Pushgateway under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana Mimir and Pushgateway with Docker?
Grafana Mimir: yes. Pushgateway: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Grafana Mimir or Pushgateway?
Pushgateway has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 1,024 MB for Grafana Mimir. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.