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Head-to-head · Time-Series Databases

Prometheus vs Grafana Mimir

  • Updated Oct 2026
  • Both researched from official sources
  • 4 checks side by side
Higher score Prometheus #5 in Time-Series Databases 8.8/10 Free plan Free plan✓ 1 of 3 features Visit Prometheus
Grafana Mimir #6 in Time-Series Databases 8.7/10 Open source ✓ 2 of 3 features Visit Grafana Mimir

Prometheus leads on 0 checks, Grafana Mimir on 1, and 3 are even. Who comes out ahead on the 4 yes/no, price and count checks where we have data for both products. The editor score weighs everything else too.

Our verdict

  • Highest scorePrometheus · 8.8/10
  • Free planonly Prometheus
  • Most featuresGrafana Mimir · 2 of 3

Prometheus scores higher on our rubric for time-series databases: 8.8 against 8.7 out of 10; our editors rank them #5 and #6.

Grafana Mimir offers horizontal scaling; Prometheus doesn't.

Prometheus is the better fit for prometheus-native monitoring metrics. Grafana Mimir is the better fit for large-scale Prometheus storage.

  • Prometheus fits best

    Prometheus-native monitoring metrics

  • Grafana Mimir fits best

    Large-scale Prometheus storage

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Side by side

Feature Prometheus 8.8/10 Visit ↗ Grafana Mimir 8.7/10 Visit ↗
At a glance
Editor score 8.8 8.7
Ranking #5 in Time-Series Databases #6 in Time-Series Databases
Best for Prometheus-native monitoring metrics Large-scale Prometheus storage
Pricing model Free Free
Starting price Free plan Open source
Free plan ✓ (best) Not checked yet
Free trial — —
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted
Support Community, Docs Email, Community, Docs
Integrations 8 integrations 12 integrations
Built for Small business, Mid-market, Enterprise Mid-market, Enterprise
Features Prometheus 1/3 · Grafana Mimir 2/3
SQL support — —
Retention policies ✓ ✓
Horizontal scaling — ✓ (best)
Specs
Deployment Self_hosted Self_hosted
Query languages PromQL PromQL
Ingestion methods HTTP pull scraping; Pushgateway; Remote Write; OpenMetrics backfilling Prometheus remote write; Grafana Agent; Prometheus Agent; OpenTelemetry; Influx; Graphite; Datadog
Our review
Pros
  • PromQL supports selecting and aggregating labeled time-series data.
  • HTTP scraping, service discovery, and exporters support metric collection.
  • Recording rules, Alertmanager, federation, and remote storage extend monitoring.
  • Horizontally scalable architecture with clustering and replication
  • Multi-tenancy, tenant isolation, and configurable retention
  • Object-store support plus recording and alerting rules
Cons
  • No SQL support for querying time-series data.
  • Local storage is single-node rather than horizontally scaled.
  • Broader architectures require federation or remote-storage integrations.
  • Self-hosted deployment requires operational ownership
  • PromQL is the documented query language, not SQL
  • Focused on Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics rather than general SQL workloads
Our verdict

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit for infrastructure, applications, and services, particularly in dynamic and microservice-oriented environments. It collects numeric metrics through HTTP-based scraping and stores…

Read the review →

Grafana Mimir is an open-source time-series database for organizations operating large-scale metrics platforms. It provides long-term storage for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics, with Prometheus-compatible remote write ingestion,…

Read the review →
  1. PrometheusTime-Series Databases 8.8Free plan
  2. Grafana MimirTime-Series Databases 8.7Open source

Strengths and trade-offs

  • Prometheus — where it wins

    • PromQL supports selecting and aggregating labeled time-series data.
    • HTTP scraping, service discovery, and exporters support metric collection.
    • Recording rules, Alertmanager, federation, and remote storage extend monitoring.

    Where it doesn't

    • No SQL support for querying time-series data.
    • Local storage is single-node rather than horizontally scaled.
    • Broader architectures require federation or remote-storage integrations.

  • Grafana Mimir — where it wins

    • Horizontally scalable architecture with clustering and replication
    • Multi-tenancy, tenant isolation, and configurable retention
    • Object-store support plus recording and alerting rules

    Where it doesn't

    • Self-hosted deployment requires operational ownership
    • PromQL is the documented query language, not SQL
    • Focused on Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics rather than general SQL workloads

More comparisons

All Time-Series databases comparisons → · Full ranking →

Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026

Last updated · How we research and update