Cortex vs TDengine
Cortex
cortexmetrics.io
TDengine
tdengine.comSide by side
| Figure | Cortex | TDengine |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $281.25/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 12 |
| Spec score · Time-Series Databases | 7.9 (#18) | 8.8 (#4) |
| License | Cortex is an open-source project licensed under Apache License 2.0. | The TDengine TSDB open-source repository is licensed under GNU Affero General Public License version 3.0. |
| Support | The project directs users to its CNCF Slack channel, GitHub issues, and the cortex-users mailing list for questions. | 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. |
| What it does | Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage solution for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. | TDengine is an AI-native industrial data platform combining a distributed time-series database with industrial data management, contextualization, analytics and AI capabilities. |
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
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.