Grafana Mimir vs Prometheus
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
Prometheus
Metrics-based monitoring and alerting toolkit
| Feature | Grafana Mimir | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | ≈5-minute setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 100 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | 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 | ★ 5,238 | ★ 66,196 |
| First released | 2022 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Chronosphere | Datadog |
What are Grafana Mimir and Prometheus?
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
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
Grafana Mimir vs Prometheus: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana Mimir versus Apache-2.0 for Prometheus. Prometheus is the lighter option, starting around 512 MB of RAM against 1,024 MB for Grafana Mimir. Prometheus is the more established project (first released 2015), while Grafana Mimir arrived in 2022. Prometheus has the considerably larger community, at 66,196 GitHub stars versus 5,238.
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 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 Grafana Mimir or Prometheus better?
Prometheus is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Grafana Mimir if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Grafana Mimir and Prometheus free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana Mimir is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Prometheus under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana Mimir and Prometheus with Docker?
Grafana Mimir: yes. Prometheus: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Grafana Mimir or Prometheus?
Prometheus has the smaller minimum footprint at 512 MB of RAM, compared to about 1,024 MB for Grafana Mimir. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.