Prometheus vs Tempo: Key Differences & When to Use Each

Comprehensive side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, and metrics

Key Differences

Compare Prometheus and Tempo across features, pricing, integrations, and community metrics. Prometheus / Tempo.

Feature

Prometheus

Monitoring

Tempo

Monitoring

Side-by-side comparison of developer tools
The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database
Distributed tracing backend
GitHub Stars
⭐ 63,889
⭐ 5,232
Contributors
👥 1,372
👥 299
Pricing
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
Languages
Go
Go
Features
  • • Alerting
  • • Graphing
  • • Hacktoberfest
  • • Metrics
  • • Monitoring
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Grafana
Integrations
  • • prometheus
  • • grafana
Momentum Score
89/100 (stable)
89/100 (slowing)
Community Health
95/100 (excellent)
30/100 (needs-attention)
Maturity Index
82/100 (established)
20/100 (experimental)
Innovation Score
88/100 (pioneering)
13/100 (traditional)
Risk Score (higher is safer)
76/100 (minimal)
29/100 (high)
Developer Experience
68/100 (fair)
16/100 (poor)
Links
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub

Prometheus Strengths

  • ✓ More popular (63,889 stars)
  • ✓ Larger community (1,372 contributors)
  • ✓ More features (5 listed)

Tempo Strengths

When to Use Prometheus vs Tempo

Use Prometheus when its strengths align better with your stack and team needs, and choose Tempo when its ecosystem, integrations, or cost profile is a better fit.

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Prometheus vs Grafana → Tempo vs Grafana → Prometheus vs Loki → Tempo vs Loki → Prometheus vs Jaeger → Tempo vs Jaeger → Prometheus vs Zipkin → Tempo vs Zipkin → Prometheus vs VictoriaMetrics → Tempo vs VictoriaMetrics → Prometheus vs Thanos → Tempo vs Thanos →

More Comparisons

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Data source: GitHub API

Last updated: 5/4/2026