SHSelfHostIndex

NGINX Prometheus Exporter 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?
NG NGINX Prometheus Exporter Official Prometheus exporter for NGINX and NGINX Plus VS PR Prometheus Metrics-based monitoring and alerting toolkit
FeatureNGINX Prometheus ExporterPrometheus
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0Apache-2.0
LanguageGoGo
Setup difficultyEasyMedium
Min. RAM64 MB512 MB
Deploymentdocker, binary, kubernetesdocker, binary, helm
GitHub stars★ 2,008★ 65,616
First released20182015
ReplacesDatadog NGINX, New Relic NGINXDatadog

Why pick each one

Choose NGINX Prometheus Exporter if…

  • Maintained by NGINX team
  • Trivial to deploy
NGINX Prometheus Exporter details

Choose Prometheus if…

  • Powerful query language
  • Reliable and scalable
  • Huge ecosystem
Prometheus details

Frequently asked questions

Is NGINX Prometheus Exporter or Prometheus better?

Neither is universally better. Prometheus has the larger community, while NGINX Prometheus Exporter is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are NGINX Prometheus Exporter and Prometheus free and open-source?

Yes. NGINX Prometheus Exporter is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Prometheus under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run NGINX Prometheus Exporter and Prometheus with Docker?

NGINX Prometheus Exporter: yes. Prometheus: yes.

Related comparisons