Prometheus vs Snowflake
Prometheus and Snowflake are both database software. Prometheus is open source under Apache-2.0, with 67k GitHub stars. Snowflake is a commercial product from Snowflake Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Prometheus when
- You run services or Kubernetes and need metrics and alerting with the de facto standard toolset.
- Pick Snowflake when
- A company has many data sources to combine for analytics and wants a managed warehouse that scales without tuning.
Side by side
A monitoring system and time-series database that scrapes metrics from services, queries them with PromQL and sends alerts.
A cloud data warehouse that separates storage from compute, for SQL analytics, data sharing and data engineering across AWS, Azure and GCP.
Long-term storage and high availability need extra components such as Thanos or Mimir.
Credit-based compute costs climb quickly without controls on warehouses and queries.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service
Go
SQL
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Snowflake Inc.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
67k GitHub stars
6.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 14 years ago, latest release v3.15.1.
Not known
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.