Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Steampipe VS Prometheus

Compare Steampipe VS Prometheus and see what are their differences

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Steampipe logo Steampipe

Steampipe: select * from cloud; The extensible SQL interface to your favorite cloud APIs select * from AWS, Azure, GCP, Github, Slack etc.

Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.
  • Steampipe Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-30
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13

Steampipe features and specs

  • Unified Interface
    Steampipe provides a unified SQL-based interface to query data from various cloud services and APIs, simplifying data access.
  • Open Source
    Being open source, Steampipe allows for community contributions, transparency, and flexibility in adapting the tool to specific needs.
  • Plugin Ecosystem
    Steampipe has a growing ecosystem of plugins that enable easy integration with numerous services, enhancing its versatility.
  • Real-Time Data Access
    It facilitates real-time querying of data from live APIs, which is beneficial for up-to-date insights and monitoring.
  • Cross-Platform Compatibility
    Steampipe is designed to work on multiple platforms, including Windows, MacOS, and Linux, making it accessible to a wide range of users.

Possible disadvantages of Steampipe

  • Complex Setup
    Initial setup and configuration can be complex, requiring a good understanding of SQL and the specific APIs being used.
  • Performance Overhead
    Query performance may be impacted due to the abstraction layer and real-time consolidation of data from multiple sources.
  • Limited Community Support
    As a relatively new tool, Steampipe may have limited community support and fewer resources compared to more established alternatives.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running multiple queries against APIs and cloud services can become resource intensive, potentially increasing costs and load on systems.
  • Learning Curve
    Users unfamiliar with SQL may face a learning curve in effectively utilizing Steampipe for querying different data sources.

Prometheus features and specs

  • Powerful Query Language
    Prometheus uses PromQL, a flexible and powerful query language that allows for complex and detailed queries.
  • Dimensional Data Model
    Prometheus employs a multidimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key-value pairs, offering great flexibility in data organization.
  • Auto-Discovery
    It supports service discovery mechanisms to automatically locate and scrape metrics from jobs, simplifying the monitoring process.
  • Alerting
    Prometheus includes built-in alerting capabilities that allow you to trigger alerts based on PromQL queries, which can be integrated with different alert management systems.
  • Scalability
    Its architecture, which uses independent single servers, scales well, allowing you to handle a large number of time series efficiently.
  • Open Source
    Prometheus is open-source and supported by a large community, offering transparency, regular updates, and numerous integrations.
  • Easy Integration
    Thanks to its compatibility with various data exporting standards and a myriad of existing exporters, integrating Prometheus into existing systems is streamlined.

Possible disadvantages of Prometheus

  • Single Points of Failure
    Prometheus instances operate independently, meaning that if a server goes down, the metrics it monitored will be unavailable unless replicated manually.
  • Storage Overhead
    Prometheus can consume significant storage, especially for high-resolution time series data, which might necessitate careful planning and management.
  • Limited Long-Term Storage
    By default, Prometheus is not designed for long-term storage of metrics and may require integration with other systems like Thanos or Cortex for this purpose.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The sheer number of features and the complexities associated with PromQL can present a steep learning curve for newcomers.
  • Scaling Write Operations
    In high-scale environments, write operations might become a bottleneck due to the single-server nature of the Prometheus architecture.
  • Lack of Native High Availability
    While Prometheus supports running multiple instances, it does not provide built-in high availability features out-of-the-box, necessitating additional configurations.
  • No Built-in Authentication and Authorization
    Prometheus lacks native support for secure authentication and authorization, which means these features must be externally managed.

Analysis of Prometheus

Overall verdict

  • Prometheus is highly regarded for its robustness, versatility, and efficiency in monitoring and alerting tasks, especially within cloud-native environments.

Why this product is good

  • Prometheus is a powerful open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability.
  • It excels at time-series data collection and querying, making it ideal for infrastructure and application monitoring.
  • Prometheus has a flexible query language, PromQL, which allows users to extract and manipulate data effectively.
  • The tool is widely adopted in the industry and has a strong community-driven ecosystem, ensuring consistent updates and support.
  • It integrates seamlessly with many other systems and services, such as Kubernetes, making it versatile across various environments.

Recommended for

  • Organizations seeking a reliable monitoring solution for dynamic cloud environments, such as Kubernetes.
  • Teams that require real-time alerting and data visualization capabilities.
  • Developers and DevOps professionals interested in leveraging a mature and active open-source monitoring tool.
  • Businesses aiming to monitor diverse and large-scale infrastructures with a flexible query system.

Steampipe videos

Superbooth 2023: Erica Synths - Steampipe

More videos:

  • Review - BEST SYNTHS @ SUPERBOOTH23: PWM Mantis, UDO Super Gemini, Erica Synths STEAMPIPEโ€ฆ and more
  • Review - Erica Synths STEAMPIPE The Synth with no oscillators!

Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Steampipe and Prometheus)
Big Data
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Infrastructure
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Steampipe and Prometheus

Steampipe Reviews

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Prometheus Reviews

Top Datadog Competitors and Alternatives in 2025
Prometheus offers robust alerting capabilities, allowing users to define alerting rules based on predefined thresholds or custom conditions. When an alert is triggered, Prometheus can send notifications via various channels such as email, PagerDuty, or Slack, enabling timely response to incidents and anomalies.
Source: www.atatus.com
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
The 10 Best Prometheus Alternatives 2024 Prometheus is one of the most well-known open-source monitoring tools out there. But is it right for you? Check out these Prometheus alternatives to find out.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Under the hood, Grafana is powered by multiple tools like Loki, Tempo, Mimir & Prometheus. SigNoz is built as a single tool to serve logs, metrics, and traces in a single pane of glass. SigNoz uses a single datastore - ClickHouse to power its observability stack. This makes SigNoz much better in correlating signals and driving better insights.
Source: signoz.io
GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate | Last9
Levitate is up to 30X cost-efficient compared with Google Managed Prometheus. This is possible because of warehousing capabilities such as data tiering, streaming aggregations, and cardinality controls, making it a much superior choice to Google Managed Prometheus.
Source: last9.io
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Prometheus is an open source monitoring solution focused on data collection and analysis. It allows users to set up network monitoring capabilities using the native toolset. The tool is able to collect information on devices using SNMP pings and examine network bandwidth usage from the device perspective, among other functinos. The PromQL system analyzes data...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Prometheus should be more popular than Steampipe. It has been mentiond 300 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Steampipe mentions (42)

  • Build API integrations with SQL and YAML โ€“ no SaaS lock-in, no drag-and-drop UIs
    The request / data fetching is interesting in how "easy" it is to write. I did basic perusal of the examples, but I'd be interested to see what it looks like with rate-limited endpoints and concurrent requests. Another tangentially related project is https://steampipe.io/ though it is for exposing APIs via Postgres tables and the clients are written using Go code and shared through a marketplace. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Cyphernetes: A Query Language for Kubernetes
    I really really like Steampipe to do this kind of query: https://steampipe.io, which is essentially PostgreSQL (literally) to query many different kind of APIs, which means you have access to all PostgreSQL's SQL language can offer to request data. They have a Kubernetes plugin at https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/kubernetes and there are a couple of things I really like: * it's super easy to request... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database
    Https://steampipe.io/ showcases some really interesting scenarios for using FDWs in place of regular ETL and API integrations. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Cloud Tools You Probably Haven't Heard Of
    Steampipe is a tool for querying cloud APIs and other data sources using SQL in a zero-ETL manner. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Osquery: An sqlite3 virtual table exposing operating system data to SQL
    Few projects in the same realm that you should also checkout - [1] Steampipe (https://steampipe.io/) [2] InfraSQL (https://iasql.com/). - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
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Prometheus mentions (300)

  • My homelab stack in 2026: what runs, why, and how it all connects
    Prometheus scrapes metrics from the stack. Node exporter covers the host, cAdvisor covers containers, and individual services expose their own endpoints where supported. The main value isn't dashboards (though those exist) - it's having a queryable record of system state over time, and a place to hook alerts when something drifts. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Best Open Source Monitoring Tools in 2026: 7 Self-Hosted Options Compared
    Prometheus is the industry-standard time-series database for infrastructure metrics. Paired with Grafana for visualization and Alertmanager for routing, it forms the backbone of monitoring at companies from startups to Netflix-scale deployments. This isn't a single tool โ€” it's an ecosystem. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Rate Limiting in Spring Boot REST APIs: Bucket4j + Redis
    To monitor and analyze rate limiting metrics, we're using a combination of Redis and Prometheus. We're storing rate limiting metrics in Redis and then using Prometheus to scrape the metrics and display them in a dashboard. Here's an example of how we're storing rate limiting metrics in Redis:. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Chronos vs Toto: Zero-Shot Forecasting Benchmark Results
    In this post, we compare two forecasting models, Chronos (Chronosโ€‘Bolt) and Toto, on telemetry from Prometheus and OpenSearch. We judge them with two easy metrics: MASE for point accuracy and CRPS for the quality of uncertainty. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • The Real Cost of Silent Data Pipeline Failures
    For monitoring infrastructure, Prometheus and Grafana are widely used for pipeline metrics collection and alerting. For orchestration that includes built-in run observability, Apache Airflow tracks run history, task durations, and failure states in a web UI. Python with SQLAlchemy is the standard stack for custom pipeline implementation with relational state management. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Steampipe and Prometheus, you can also consider the following products

CloudQuery - CloudQuery enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your cloud assets.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

StackQL.io - Query, provision, secure & operate cloud resources using SQL

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Turbot - Turbot's guardrails deliver automated operational, cloud security and cloud compliance controls of AWS deployments and other cloud enterprise infrastructure. Learn more.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.