Netdata vs Prometheus
Netdata
netdata.cloud
Prometheus
prometheus.ioSide by side
| Figure | Netdata | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $4.50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Monitoring | 9.0 (#5) | 7.7 (#35) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 9.0 (#6) | 7.6 (#31) |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.0 (#6) | 7.7 (#32) |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Monitoring | 9.0 (#4) | 7.7 (#23) |
| Spec score · Server Monitoring | 9.0 (#5) | 7.6 (#28) |
| Spec score · Metrics Monitoring Tools | 8.9 (#6) | 7.7 (#21) |
| Spec score · Cloud Monitoring | 8.9 (#6) | 7.6 (#15) |
| Deployment | Netdata offers a managed cloud platform and an on-premises deployment, including air-gapped deployment options. | Official components have precompiled binaries and Docker images, and the Prometheus download page lists Windows, macOS, and Linux builds. |
| Founded | 2016 | 2012 |
| Integrations | Netdata advertises more than 800 collectors and notification integrations, including operating systems, databases, containers, cloud services, OpenMetrics, StatsD and logs. | The ecosystem includes client libraries, exporters, Pushgateway, and Alertmanager; integrations also include Grafana for visualization and webhook-based alert notifications. |
| Security | The site states that Netdata Cloud is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and lists SSO and role-based access control among Business features. | Prometheus and most exporters support TLS, including client certificate authentication, and HTTP Basic Authentication is also supported. |
| Support | The site lists documentation and community support, with premium support available. | The project offers community support through channels including Slack, mailing lists, and a Discourse forum, and lists independent commercial support providers separately. |
| What it does | Netdata is a real-time infrastructure observability platform for systems, containers, applications, cloud environments, Kubernetes and IoT devices. | Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects and stores metrics as time series. |
Plans
Netdata
- CommunityFree
- Business$4.50 a month
- Homelab$90 a year
- Enterprise On-PremisePriced on request
In their own words
Netdata
Netdata is an observability platform for real-time infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. Its agent gathers metrics and logs and provides per-second monitoring, machine-learning anomaly detection, dashboards, and alerts. Netdata lists more than 800 collectors and notification channels, including Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, email, and webhooks. The agent can ingest Prometheus, OpenMetrics, StatsD, and OpenTelemetry data and export to Prometheus Remote Write, InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, and TimescaleDB. Organizations can use the managed cloud platform or deploy on premises, including in air-gapped environments. Netdata says metrics remain on the user's infrastructure while only metadata reaches the cloud. Native Android and iOS apps provide alerts and notifications. The Community plan is free, with up to five active connected nodes and one active custom dashboard per room. Signing up for Netdata Cloud includes a 14-day Business trial for any number of nodes with no limits. Business costs $4.50 per month billed annually, with a stated total of $540.00/year.
Prometheus
Prometheus is a free, open-source toolkit for systems monitoring and alerting that collects metrics as time series. Each series is identified by a metric name and key-value labels, and PromQL is used to query the data. Prometheus typically gathers metrics by pulling over HTTP; it can also receive pushed data through an intermediary gateway. Targets can be found with service discovery or configured statically. The main server runs as a standalone monolithic binary without external dependencies, and official components are available as precompiled binaries and Docker images. Its ecosystem includes client libraries, exporters, Pushgateway and Alertmanager, with Grafana for visualization and webhooks for alert notifications. Prometheus and most exporters support TLS, client certificate authentication and HTTP Basic Authentication. The project advises against exposing component HTTP endpoints to public networks without protective measures. Servers do not depend on network storage or remote services, which the project says can help during outages. Prometheus is not recommended for uses requiring 100% accurate data, such as per-request billing.