8 Best Prometheus Alternatives & Competitors (2026)

TimescaleDB extends PostgreSQL with time-series capabilities, combining relational queries and hypertables for IoT and monitoring workloads. It provides strong SQL support and easy integration with existing Postgres ecosystems. Versus InfluxData it may involve higher storage overhead for ultra-high ingest rates but benefits teams already invested in PostgreSQL tooling and complex joins.

ClickHouse is a columnar OLAP database optimized for high-speed analytics on large datasets including time series. It delivers exceptional query performance on historical data and integrates well with data lakes. In comparison to InfluxData, ClickHouse offers broader analytical flexibility but typically needs more configuration for real-time edge ingestion and continuous sensor streams.

QuestDB is an open-source time series database emphasizing high ingest throughput and SQL queries with time-based extensions. It targets financial services and IoT use cases with in-memory and disk storage tiers. Relative to InfluxData it provides simpler deployment for high-velocity data but has a smaller ecosystem of agents and managed cloud options.

Apache Druid is a real-time analytics database designed for sub-second queries on streaming event data at scale. It supports ingestion from Kafka and integrates with BI tools. Compared with InfluxData, Druid shines in interactive exploration of large event volumes but may require more operational expertise for continuous high-resolution telemetry pipelines.

VictoriaMetrics is a fast, cost-efficient time series database and monitoring backend compatible with Prometheus remote write. It focuses on high cardinality and long-term storage with lower resource usage. Against InfluxData it offers strong performance for metrics replacement scenarios but less emphasis on edge-to-cloud continuity or physical AI sensor streams.

Elasticsearch with time series data streams handles logs, metrics, and events with powerful search and aggregation capabilities. It supports observability use cases via the Elastic Stack. Compared to InfluxData it provides richer full-text and log correlation features but can be more resource-intensive for pure high-frequency numeric sensor data.