Timescale Cloud

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

Managed PostgreSQL with the TimescaleDB extension for time-series data, plus vector search, from the company now called Tiger Data.

Adopt it when

You want time-series performance while keeping full PostgreSQL and SQL for the rest of your data.

Watch out

Some TimescaleDB features are under a source-available licence, which limits other hosts from offering them.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Cloud service

Built with

PostgreSQL and C

What the license allows

Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the maker's description and Wikipedia. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Open-source alternatives to Timescale Cloud

1. 1
   Prometheus prometheus

   The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

   Complete system Production-ready You run services or Kubernetes and need metrics and alerting with the de facto standard toolset.

   ★ 67k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
2. 2
   InfluxDB influxdata

   Scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics

   Building block Production-ready You collect large volumes of time-stamped data such as IoT or monitoring metrics.

   ★ 32k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today
3. 3
   TDengine taosdata

   High-performance, scalable time-series database designed for Industrial IoT (IIoT) scenarios

   Building block Production-ready You collect data from many devices and need efficient storage with a table-per-device model.

   ★ 25k AGPL-3.0 C Active, pushed today
4. 4
   VictoriaMetrics VictoriaMetrics

   VictoriaMetrics: fast, cost-effective monitoring solution and time series database

   Building block Production-ready Your Prometheus setup struggles with scale or retention and you want a drop-in, cheaper storage backend.

   ★ 18k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
5. 5
   QuestDB questdb

   QuestDB is a high performance, open-source, time-series database

   Building block Production-ready You store high-frequency time-stamped data such as trades, sensor readings or metrics and want SQL with low latency.

   ★ 17k Apache-2.0 Java Active, pushed today
6. 6
   IoTDB apache

   Apache IoTDB

   Building block Production-ready You store large volumes of industrial device data and need efficient compression and edge-to-cloud sync.

   ★ 6.4k Apache-2.0 Java Active, pushed today
7. 7
   Mimir grafana

   Grafana Mimir provides horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus.

   Building block Production-ready You run Prometheus at large scale across teams and need multi-tenant, highly available metric storage.

   ★ 5.3k AGPL-3.0 Go Active, pushed today
8. 8
   M3 m3db

   M3 monorepo - Distributed TSDB, Aggregator and Query Engine, Prometheus Sidecar, Graphite Compatible, Metrics Platform

   Complete system Usable You run Prometheus at very large scale and need horizontally scalable long-term metrics storage.

   ★ 4.9k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed 14 days ago
9. 9
   Crate crate

   CrateDB is a distributed and scalable SQL database for storing and analyzing massive amounts of data in near real-time, even with complex queries. It is PostgreSQL-compatible, and based on Lucene.

   Building block Production-ready You collect industrial or IoT data at volume and want SQL queries with full-text and vector search.

   ★ 4.5k Apache-2.0 Java Active, pushed today
10. 10
    FlashDB armink

    An ultra-lightweight database that supports key-value and time series data | 一款支持 KV 数据和时序数据的超轻量级数据库

    Building block Production-ready You build embedded firmware that needs to persist settings or logs on flash without a file system.

    ★ 2.9k Apache-2.0 C Active, pushed 5 days ago

Other commercial time-series databases

1. 1
   InfluxDB Cloud InfluxData

   InfluxDB 3 is the leading time series database to collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data in real-time.

   Building block Production-ready You collect high-volume IoT or monitoring metrics and want a purpose-built time-series store you do not run yourself.

   298 readers a month Since 2013 Commercial

Under it

Every program, Timescale Cloud included, runs on a microchip.

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape