InfluxDB creator here. I'd say it's on par and in some cases a bit better. They can do some optimizations that we're unable to do. We have to worry about writing historical data rather than just append only workloads. We also have to support more data types than float64.
The design of the new Prometheus engine and InfluxDB's Time Structured Merge Tree engine are very similar. They're both heavily inspired by LSM Trees.
Our goal is to add more support for Prometheus standards like the metrics format and even PromQL over time. We recently added remote read/write support, which will be in the 1.4 release next week.
https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdb-now-supports-promet...
I'd like to see Influx become something that is complementary to Prometheus or at least solidly in the Prometheus ecosystem, like players like Weaveworks, etc.
While there is no direct comparison to InfluxDB in the article, look at the disk usage and (more importantly) disk I/O utilization, which is indistinguishable from zero on the graph, whereas before it was at 20-30% with the same load.
So not on par. Much, much better.
(Of course, Prometheus and InfluxDB are not perfect substitutes for one another, so there's much more to look at than just storage engine performance.)
The third version of the InfluxDB database is basically the same core design as Prometheus's third database version which 2.0 uses. I'd expect performance to be broadly similar, maybe a little better with Prometheus as we can take advantage of the characteristics of our domain.
We do have a comparison to Influx on our website: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/#promethe...
Which is the right choice really depends on the use case. If you're doing metrics-based operational monitoring, Prometheus is generally best.
FWIW, when I met Paul Dix a few months ago, he had nothing but good to say about the new Prometheus. They released this blog post shortly after our meeting:
I wouldn't see them as competitors so much as complimentary. Influx is really going for the long term tsdb storage, whereas prometheus is more shorter term with higher resolutions and alerting.
Yup, I'm definitely a fan of their work. The new engine is a great design and all the work on the metrics standard is great. Having that as a standard format for service implementors to expose performance metrics is invaluable and we're going to support that as much as we can.
The design of the new Prometheus engine and InfluxDB's Time Structured Merge Tree engine are very similar. They're both heavily inspired by LSM Trees.
Our goal is to add more support for Prometheus standards like the metrics format and even PromQL over time. We recently added remote read/write support, which will be in the 1.4 release next week. https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdb-now-supports-promet...
I'd like to see Influx become something that is complementary to Prometheus or at least solidly in the Prometheus ecosystem, like players like Weaveworks, etc.