Keep vs Prometheus
| Tagline | Open-source alert management platform to correlate and deduplicate noisy alerts | Industry-standard metrics monitoring and alerting toolkit with PromQL |
| Category | Monitoring & Status Pages | Monitoring & Status Pages |
| Replaces | Datadog, Statuspage, Pingdom | Datadog |
| GitHub stars | 6.5k | 65k |
| Language | Python | Go |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 4/5 Involved |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes | Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 1 month ago | 5 days ago |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Keep
- AI correlation features require OpenAI API key (not fully self-contained)
- Relatively young project; some integrations are still alpha quality
- No built-in on-call scheduling; must integrate with external tools
Prometheus
- No built-in dashboards UI; you must pair it with Grafana
- Long-term storage and horizontal scale need add-ons (Thanos, Cortex, Mimir)
- No logs, traces, or APM out of the box (metrics only)
- Steeper operational learning curve than turnkey Datadog
Bottom line
Choose Keep if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Prometheus for the larger community and ecosystem. Prometheus has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Keep
Open-source alert management platform to correlate and deduplicate noisy alerts