Google BigQuery vs Prometheus
Google BigQuery and Prometheus are both database software. Google BigQuery is a commercial product from Google. Prometheus is open source under Apache-2.0, with 67k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Google BigQuery when
- You are on Google Cloud or export GA4 data and want SQL analytics without managing servers.
- Pick Prometheus when
- You run services or Kubernetes and need metrics and alerting with the de facto standard toolset.
Side by side
Google Cloud's serverless data warehouse for SQL analytics over very large datasets, with built-in ML and GA4 export.
A monitoring system and time-series database that scrapes metrics from services, queries them with PromQL and sends alerts.
On-demand pricing charges per data scanned, so careless queries cost real money.
Long-term storage and high availability need extra components such as Thanos or Mimir.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service
Self-hosted server
SQL
Go
Closed source, sold by Google
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
313 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
67k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 14 years ago, latest release v3.15.1.
Other comparisons
More databases
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.