Prometheus vs Pushgateway
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Prometheus
Metrics-based monitoring and alerting toolkit
VS
Pushgateway
Push acceptor for ephemeral and batch job metrics
| Feature | Prometheus | Pushgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | ≈5-minute setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 100 · Excellent | 87 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 32 MB |
| Deployment | docker, binary, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 66,196 | ★ 3,369 |
| First released | 2015 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Datadog | Datadog |
What are Prometheus and Pushgateway?
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
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
Prometheus vs Pushgateway: key differences
Both projects are written in Go. Pushgateway is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 512 MB for Prometheus. Prometheus has the considerably larger community, at 66,196 GitHub stars versus 3,369.
Why pick each one
Choose Prometheus if…
- Powerful query language
- Reliable and scalable
- Huge ecosystem
Watch out for
- No long-term storage by default
- Dashboards need Grafana
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 Prometheus or Pushgateway better?
Neither is universally better. Prometheus 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 Prometheus and Pushgateway free and open-source?
Yes. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Pushgateway under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Prometheus and Pushgateway with Docker?
Prometheus: yes. Pushgateway: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Prometheus or Pushgateway?
Pushgateway has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 512 MB for Prometheus. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.