Prometheus alternatives

2 tools to consider instead of Prometheus, shown against it.

Prometheus VictoriaMetrics InfluxDB
Vendor Cloud Native Computing Foundation VictoriaMetrics, Inc. InfluxData, Inc.
Pricing model Open source + paid options Free tier + paid plans Free tier + paid plans
Free tier Yes Yes Yes
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source Yes (Apache-2.0) Yes (Apache-2.0) Yes (MIT)
Best for Platform and SRE teams monitoring infrastructure and Kubernetes workloads, usually paired with Grafana for dashboards. SRE and platform teams outgrowing Prometheus's storage or cardinality limits without changing their query language. Teams building infrastructure, IoT or sensor monitoring systems that need a database purpose-built for time series.
Pricing

Free and open source under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; no first-party managed cloud version exists.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

The open-source database is free; Enterprise licensing is custom-quoted with no published price list.

Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted.

Core is free and self-hosted; Enterprise and the managed Cloud Dedicated tier are custom-priced, and Cloud Serverless is metered by ingestion, query and storage usage with a starting free credit.

Core (OSS) Free
Cloud Serverless Usage-based
Enterprise / Cloud Dedicated Custom pricing

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features
  • Pull-based metrics scraping
  • Built-in time-series storage engine
  • PromQL query and alerting language
  • Service discovery for dynamic infrastructure
  • Alertmanager for routing and deduplicating alerts
  • Remote-write support to long-term storage backends
  • PromQL/MetricsQL compatible querying
  • Prometheus remote-write, Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTelemetry ingestion
  • High compression for high-cardinality metrics
  • Single-node and horizontally scalable cluster modes
  • Long-term retention at lower storage cost than raw Prometheus
  • Downsampling and multi-tenancy (Enterprise)
  • Columnar time-series storage on Arrow/Parquet
  • SQL and InfluxQL query support
  • High-throughput write ingestion
  • Built-in retention policies and downsampling
  • Telegraf agent for metrics collection
  • High availability and read replicas (Enterprise/Cloud Dedicated)

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