Best alternatives to GreptimeDB in 2026

To know whether their servers and apps are healthy, tech teams collect three kinds of signals: numbers (metrics), text records (logs) and request journeys (traces). Traditionally each kind needs its own storage system — three tools to install, learn and pay for. GreptimeDB is a single database that stores and searches all three, which means less to maintain and lower storage bills. GreptimeDB is an open-source database purpose-built for observability data, consolidating metrics, logs, traces and events into one system instead of the traditional Prometheus + Loki + Elasticsearch stack. Everything is modeled as timestamped events in a columnar format, which enables cross-signal correlation — joining a latency spike to the logs and traces around it — with a single query. It speaks both SQL and PromQL, so existing Prometheus dashboards and alerts keep working, and ingests natively via OpenTelemetry across all signal types. The architecture is Rust on Apache Arrow and DataFusion, split into four independently scalable components (Frontend, Datanode, Metasrv, Flownode), with object storage — S3, GCS or Azure Blob — as primary storage. That makes compute stateless and long retention cheap. In-database preprocessing pipelines, streaming and materialized views handle transformation without an external ETL layer. The core reached v1.0 GA and is Apache 2.0 (6.5k GitHub stars); enterprise features and a managed cloud are licensed separately.