Cerberus vs Cortex by SKYNETLAB
Side-by-side comparison of features, pros & cons, pricing, and community votes (2026).
🏆 Cortex by SKYNETLAB leads with 85 upvotes
Keep Grafana®. Swap the backend.
Cerberus is an innovative open-source gateway designed to enhance the flexibility of monitoring and observability stacks, specifically tailored for Grafana users. It allows seamless swapping of backend data sources like Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo with ClickHouse, providing a more scalable and performant alternative without sacrificing existing dashboards, alerting mechanisms, or CLI tooling. This makes it an ideal choice for developers and DevOps teams seeking to modernize their telemetry infrastructure while maintaining their familiar visualization environment. What sets Cerberus apart is its drop-in compatibility, enabling users to transition to ClickHouse effortlessly and leverage its high-speed querying capabilities and efficient data storage. Its open architecture ensures that teams can tailor their setup to meet evolving demands without overhauling their entire observability stack.
Pros
- Enables seamless backend replacement without disrupting existing Grafana setups
- Open-source, customizable, and flexible for various telemetry data sources
- Improves query performance and scalability with ClickHouse backend
- Retains existing alerting, dashboards, and CLI tools, reducing migration overhead
Cons
- Relatively new tool with a smaller community and ecosystem
- Requires familiarity with ClickHouse and backend configuration
- Potential compatibility issues with complex or custom Grafana setups
Best for
- • Replacing Prometheus backend for improved scalability in large environments
- • Migrating from Loki to ClickHouse for more efficient log querying
- • Switching Tempo backend to enhance trace data processing performance
- • Modernizing observability stacks without redesigning dashboards
Pricing: Cerberus is open-source and free to use, making it accessible for individual developers and organizations seeking cost-effective telemetry solutions.
The memory layer that decides what's worth remembering
Cortex by SKYNETLAB is an innovative hosted semantic memory platform designed to enhance AI systems' ability to remember and reason over data. It connects seamlessly over MCP, allowing AI models like Claude to access a structured, high-quality memory layer that filters redundant information, tracks contradictions, and attributes sources to facts. The setup is remarkably quick, taking just two minutes, and it works effortlessly with any MCP client, making it accessible for a broad range of AI applications. Built with an EU infrastructure and a patent-pending engine, Cortex emphasizes data integrity, transparency, and efficiency, making it ideal for organizations seeking a robust memory solution for their AI tools. Its focus on quality control—rejecting roughly 80% of writes as redundant—ensures that only valuable, non-duplicate information is retained, fostering accurate and reliable AI responses.
Pros
- Rapid 2-minute setup with any MCP client
- High-quality memory filtering and redundancy rejection
- Contradiction tracking enhances data consistency
- Source attribution improves transparency
- EU infrastructure ensures compliance and data security
Cons
- Limited information on advanced customization options
- No details on scalability for very large datasets
- Vague on integration support beyond MCP
Best for
- • Enhancing AI chatbots with reliable, structured memory
- • Knowledge management for AI-driven decision-making
- • Tracking and managing contradictions in data sources
- • Building a persistent memory layer for AI assistants
Pricing: Pricing not verified