Spacetimedb Vs Influx Vs Graphite Vs Prometheus

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Summary Comparison Table: SpaceTimeDB vs InfluxDB vs Prometheus vs Graphite
3. Key Features Overview
4. Primary Use Case
5. Data Types Supported
6. Consistency Model
7. Event Sourcing & Time Travel
8. Storage Model
9. Query Language
10. Retention and Durability
11. Real-Time Capability
12. Scalability
13. Developer experience
14. Alerting & Monitoring
15. Integration & Ecosystem
16. Use Cases (When to Use)
17. Applications & Industry Fit
18. Pricing
19. Conclusion

Introduction

Time-series and event-state databases are on the rise today. They play an important role in powering real-time applications, real-time applications, system monitoring, analytics, and telemetry pipelines. Of late, there has been a growing need for systems that can handle high-ingest rates, real-time updates, and historical querying, choosing the right database is a strategic decision that directly impacts performance, scalability, and cost.

This article aims to compare four popular solutions — SpaceTimeDB, InfluxDB, Prometheus, and Graphite. We will compare them against each other based on key dimensions such as architecture, scalability, querying, alerting, pricing, and ideal use cases. The article is aimed to help you choose the right fit for your project or organization.

Summary Comparison Table: SpaceTimeDB vs InfluxDB vs Prometheus vs Graphite

Before we go in-depth, use this table to see a summary of the comparisons between SpaceTimeDB vs InfluxDB vs Prometheus vs Graphite.

Key Features Overview

SpaceTimeDB

• • Real-time SQL querying plus reactive synchronization, making it ideal for applications that require real-time state changes and fast updates.
  • Built-in event sourcing and time-travel capabilities — store and replay the state of your application at any point.
  • Provides WebSocket-first architecture, making it a good fit for real-time collaborative apps or multiplayer applications.
  • TypeScript and Rust SDKs for strong developer experience and easy integration.

InfluxDB

• • High-performance, time-series engine designed for high ingestion rates.
  • Features like retention policies, continuous queries, and downsampling make it great for managing long-term metric storage.
  • Native support for Grafana integration for visualizations.
  • Advanced analytics can be done using Flux, a functional query language.
  • Great for monitoring and time-series data analytics at scale.

Prometheus

• • Provides powerful PromQL for querying metrics and alerting.
  • Built for infrastructure monitoring, particularly for services running on containers and cloud-native environments.
  • Pull model allows Prometheus to scrape metrics from services over HTTP at specified intervals.
  • Alertmanager handles alerts, and Grafana is commonly used for dashboarding.
  • Focuses heavily on operational metrics for service health, performance, and observability.

Graphite

• • Offers basic but effective metric storage and visualization.
  • Data is collected in the form of time-series metrics, which can be visualized using Grafana or similar tools.
  • Does not provide complex querying or advanced features like event sourcing.
  • Good for basic monitoring in smaller environments or legacy systems, but lacks the scalability and advanced features of more modern solutions.

Primary Use Case

SpaceTimeDB: Real-time multiplayer app state, event sourcing, time-travel debugging

InfluxDB: High-performance time series storage, metrics, IoT, Monitoring

Graphite: TIme series metrics for system monitoring

Prometheus: Monitoring, alerting, and short-term time series storage for infrastructure/app metrics.

Data Types Supported

SpaceTimeDB

• • Supports SQL-like structured data: integers, floats, strings, booleans, enums, JSON, arrays, and custom types.
  • Optimized for stateful records and events with versioning and time-travel.

InfluxDB

• • Time-series data model with fields (float, int, bool, string) and tags (indexed strings).
  • Native support for temporal aggregations and downsampling.

Prometheus

• • Numeric float64 values tied to timestamps and labels (key-value pairs).
  • Metric types: Counter, Gauge, Histogram, Summary.
  • No native string/text field storage.

Graphite

• • Only float metrics (numeric time series).
  • No support for tags, types, or structured fields in core Graphite.

Consistency Model

SpaceTimeDB

• • Strong consistency (serializable transactions).
  • Deterministic state replication and time-travel.
  • Great for correctness-critical collaborative apps.

InfluxDB

• • Eventual consistency in cloud mode.
  • Writes can be eventually consistent in high-load scenarios.
  • Not ideal for applications requiring strict ordering or constraints.

Prometheus

• • A pull-based model with eventual consistency.
  • Designed for monitoring, not for transactional accuracy.
  • Metric staleness is expected behavior.

Graphite

• • No formal consistency model.
  • Behavior depends on the backend (e.g., whisper files).
  • Metric accuracy depends on write frequency and disk performance.

Event Sourcing & Time Travel

• SpaceTimeDB: Natively supports event sourcing with full state history and time-travel debugging.
• InfluxDB: Does not support event sourcing; focuses on point-in-time metric storage.
• Prometheus: No event sourcing; built for periodic metric snapshots, not state transitions.
• Graphite: No event sourcing support; stores raw time-series data only.

Storage Model

• SpaceTimeDB: Event-sourced SQL state with temporal queries (SQLite-like).
• InfluxDB: Time-series optimized columnar store.
• Graphite: Whisper DB files (fixed-size), hierarchical path structure.
• Prometheus: Custom TSDB that stores metrics with labels and timestamps.

Query Language

• SpaceTimeDB: SQL.
• InfluxDB: InfluxQL and Flux (functional DSL).
• Graphite: Query functions embedded in URLs.
• Prometheus: PromQL.

Retention and Durability

• SpaceTimeDB: Full historical state with time-travel; custom retention policies planned.
• InfluxDB: Configurable retention policies per bucket.
• Graphite: Fixed retention per metric.
• Prometheus: Short-term storage (default 15 days); long-term via remote write integrations.

Real-Time Capability

• SpaceTimeDB: Built-in real-time sync to clients via WebSocket.
• InfluxDB: Near real-time writes and reads; not push-based.
• Graphite: Passive ingestion; no native real-time push.
• Prometheus: Pull model; scrapes targets every N seconds; not push-native.

Scalability

• SpaceTimeDB: Primarily designed for single-node setups. Horizontal scaling and clustering are experimental or planned.
• InfluxDB: Highly scalable, especially in InfluxDB Cloud and Enterprise. Handles high cardinality and IoT-scale workloads.
• Graphite: Poor scalability out of the box, but can be improved via sharding or tools like carbon-relay-ng.
• Prometheus: Single-node by design; limited native scalability, but federation and remote write help extend it.

Developer experience

SpaceTimeDB:

• Built with modern DX in mind: SQL+real-time+native Rust and Typescript bindings.
• FUll-stack devs can think in terms of events, stat, and querying without syncing logic
• Minimal boilerplate for real-time apps

InfluxDB

• Excellent CLI, HTTP APIs, and Ui dashboard.
• Can write queries in InfluxQL or FLux
• Good integrations with TElegraf, Grafana, and client libraries

Graphite

• Dated and limited functionality
• Query syntax is URL-based and arcane
• Basic but functional

Prometheus

• Strong ecosystem, native support in Kubernetes
• PromQL is expressive but has a learning curve
• Tight integration with Grafana, alerting systems, and exporters

Alerting & Monitoring

SpaceTimeDB

• • Not focused on infrastructure-style monitoring or traditional alerting.
  • You can implement custom alert logic using SQL + WebSocket notifications.
  • Suitable for app-level events (e.g., "user count > N" or "game state mismatch").
  • No built-in alert manager.

InfluxDB

• • Supports native alerting (especially in InfluxDB Cloud).
  • Alerts can be defined via Thresholds, Deadman checks, or custom Flux queries.
  • Can send notifications to Slack, email, HTTP endpoints, etc.
  • Visual rule editor in Influx UI.

Graphite

• • No native alerting framework.
  • Third-party tools (e.g., Graphite-beacon, Bosun) are needed for alerts.
  • Lacks the flexibility and integration options of modern systems.

Prometheus

• • Best-in-class alerting for infrastructure and app metrics.
  • Alert rules are written in PromQL and managed by Alertmanager.
  • Can trigger alerts on missing metrics, thresholds, or complex logic.
  • Supports silencing, grouping, routing, and retrying alerts.

Integration & Ecosystem

SpaceTimeDB

• • SDKs for Rust, TypeScript, with WebSocket sync.
  • Native integration with multiplayer games, and collaborative tools.
  • Limited third-party integrations currently.
  • Designed to be embedded directly into your app's backend/frontend logic.

InfluxDB

• • Integrates with Telegraf, Grafana, Kapacitor, Chronograf.
  • Wide support for ingesting from IoT, HTTP, MQTT, syslog, etc.
  • Supports pushing and pulling metrics.

Graphite

• • Works with Grafana, but requires effort to scale/integrate.
  • Older integrations (e.g., collectd, statsd) are still supported.
  • Limited flexibility for modern stacks (K8s, cloud-native).

Prometheus

• • Huge ecosystem of exporters (for hardware, JVM, PostgreSQL, etc.).
  • Deep integration with Kubernetes, Grafana, Alertmanager, Loki.
  • Standard for observability stacks (SRE-friendly).
  • Also integrates with OpenMetrics and OpenTelemetry.

Use Cases (When to Use)

SpaceTimeDB

• • Real-time collaborative apps (e.g., whiteboards, multiplayer editors).
  • Apps where deterministic state, event replay, and time-travel debugging are key.
  • Replacing Firestore or socket-based sync backends with full SQL power.

InfluxDB

• • Storing high-volume time series from sensors, logs, or metrics.
  • Long-term retention of metric data.
  • Time-based anomaly detection, dashboards, and alerts.

Graphite

• • Legacy systems still emitting statsd/collectd metrics.
  • Small to mid-size monitoring use cases where minimal setup is okay.
  • Historical/legacy integrations where changing stack isn’t feasible.

Prometheus

• • Infrastructure monitoring, especially Kubernetes-native setups.
  • Apps/services with internal metrics exposed over HTTP endpoints.
  • Use cases requiring flexible alerting and strong Grafana integration.

Applications & Industry Fit

SpaceTimeDB

• Real-time applications (e.g., multiplayer games, interactive dashboards)
• Collaborative tools that require state synchronization across users
• Finance systems requiring event sourcing and time-travel debugging
• IoT visualization tools needing real-time data collection and historical event tracking

InfluxDB

• IoT applications, sensor data, and time-series data analytics
• High-volume, time-stamped data storage (e.g., logs, telemetry)
• Widely used in DevOps for application and system monitoring
• Industries: energy, logistics, finance, healthcare for data-driven insights

Prometheus

• Cloud-native infrastructure monitoring, especially in Kubernetes environments
• Service monitoring and performance monitoring in microservices and distributed systems
• Observability and operational health monitoring in DevOps and SRE contexts
• E-commerce and critical applications for operational uptime and alerting

Graphite

• Legacy systems requiring basic time-series metric tracking
• Small to mid-scale internal monitoring with minimal setup
• Basic metric visualization and monitoring needs
• Suitable for environments where advanced features

SpaceTimeDB

• • Perfect for real-time applications, including multiplayer games, interactive dashboards, and collaborative tools that need to manage and sync the state across users.
  • Finance and audit systems where tracking state changes over time is essential.
  • IoT visualization tools that require both real-time data collection and historical event tracking.

InfluxDB

• • Best for IoT applications, sensor data, and time-series data analytics where large volumes of time-stamped data are generated continuously.
  • Widely used in DevOps, application monitoring, telemetry, and performance metrics storage.
  • Common in industries such as energy, logistics, finance, and healthcare for data-driven insights.

Prometheus

• • Ideal for cloud-native monitoring — particularly in environments like Kubernetes where monitoring services and infrastructure is critical.
  • Widely adopted for system observability, performance monitoring, and alerting in DevOps and SRE contexts.
  • Used in e-commerce, microservices architectures, and distributed systems where operational health and uptime are priorities.

Graphite

• • Best suited for legacy systems or small-scale monitoring use cases where advanced features aren’t required.
  • Often found in internal toolchains or smaller companies that need basic, no-frills metric visualization and storage.
  • Common in industries where simple, non-complex metric tracking is needed.

Pricing

Conclusion

We have explored the strengths and trade-offs of several time-series and event-state databases, each tailored to different use cases and operational domains.

SpaceTimeDB is ideal for real-time, event-driven applications such as multiplayer games, collaborative tools, and live dashboards. It simplifies state management through built-in SQL querying, event history, and real-time client synchronization.

InfluxDB is a strong choice for high-ingest, high-resolution time-series data. It excels in scenarios like IoT telemetry, sensor data, and long-term metric storage, offering flexibility and scalability through both open-source and cloud offerings.

Prometheus remains the go-to solution for infrastructure and service monitoring. Its powerful query language, native alerting capabilities, and seamless integration with Kubernetes and Grafana make it the industry standard for observability.

Graphite is relevant mainly for legacy systems or small-scale internal monitoring setups. While reliable in simple environments, it lacks the scalability and modern tooling needed for today’s complex infrastructures.

In short, the right tool depends entirely on your domain:

• Building real-time apps? → SpaceTimeDB
• Handling IoT-scale metrics? → InfluxDB
• Monitoring infrastructure or services? → Prometheus
• Supporting legacy setups? → Graphite