BTrDB vs TDengine
BTrDB
btrdb.readthedocs.io
TDengine
tdengine.comSide by side
| Figure | BTrDB | TDengine |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $281.25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 12 |
| Spec score · Time-Series Databases | 8.8 (#3) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Installation | The maker recommends installing btrdb-python with pip and offers data-science and all-optional-dependency extras. | Official packages support Linux and Windows, and documentation also provides Docker and Kubernetes deployment paths. |
| Integrations | The Python documentation includes examples using Dash and Plotly to plot data queried from BTrDB. | The documented ecosystem includes Grafana integration, Kafka integration, MQTT, OPC, PI System and Excel connectivity. |
| License | The BTrDB server repository identifies its license as MIT. | The TDengine TSDB open-source repository is licensed under GNU Affero General Public License version 3.0. |
| Support | The documentation invites users to submit pull requests or open a GitHub issue for additions or corrections. | Annual licenses include business-hours standard support, while premium support offers 24×7 Severity 1 coverage; free-tier support is optional at $3,375 per year. |
| Visualization | The docs show examples using BTrDB data with Dash and Plotly. | IDMP provides dashboards, trends, process visualizations, KPI reporting and automatic scenario recognition for dashboards and reports. |
Plans
TDengine
- Free TierFree
- Self-hosted Free TierFree
- Starter$970 a month
- TDengine Cloud Starter$970 a month
- TDengine Cloud Small$1,740 a month
- TDengine Cloud Medium$2,570 a month
- Optional Annual Support$3,375 a year
- Starter$11,640 a year
- 7,500-tag Annual License$12,500 a year
- Self-hosted 7,500-tag annual license$12,500 a year
In their own words
BTrDB
BTrDB is a free, MIT-licensed, self-hosted time-series database for dense, high-precision univariate data. It partitions data by time, supports clustered deployments, and records stream changes as new versions that queries can target. Streams have unique UUIDs and can be grouped into collections with tags and annotations. The Python btrdb package supports nanosecond-timestamp queries and insertion through Stream.insert, PyArrow tables, or pandas DataFrames. Statistical queries can return minimum, maximum, mean, count, and standard deviation without reading every underlying point. StreamSets can be filtered and converted to pandas DataFrames or CSV files. Documentation shows Dash and Plotly visualization, Ray-worker serialization, TLS on port 4411, and API-key authentication requiring that TLS port. Arrow-based tabular methods are documented for commercial customers with Arrow-enabled servers. BTrDB reports measured cluster throughput and compression figures, and describes smart-grid aggregation at city or country scale as one target use case.
TDengine
TDengine is an industrial data platform combining data ingestion, storage, analytics, modeling, visualization, and AI applications. Its two core components are TDengine TSDB and TDengine IDMP; TSDB is a distributed time-series database with built-in caching, stream processing, and data subscription. The platform connects to industrial sources including OPC, MQTT, and Kafka, and includes ETL for data cleaning and transformation. It offers a REST API described by OpenAPI, plus JDBC, ODBC, Kafka, MQTT, iframe embedding, and an Excel Add-In. Self-hosted deployments can run at the edge, in containers or virtual machines, on local servers, or in public, private, and hybrid clouds. Managed TDengine Cloud is offered on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. TDengine TSDB-OSS is open source under AGPL and includes clustering. The self-hosted Free Tier covers up to 5,000 tags. Listed plans include Starter at $970 a month, a 7,500-tag self-hosted annual license at $12,500 a year, and a 7,500-tag self-hosted perpetual license at $31,250 as a one-time purchase.