With the recent announcement of InfluxDB 3 Core, the latest OSS version of InfluxData’s flagship time-series database, many users are questioning the company’s commitment to open source. Coming more than a year after commercial versions of InfluxDB 3, the OSS product — released as a “public alpha” in mid-January 2025 — has severe limitations that further curtail its use in real-world scenarios, making it more of a toy than a real open-source solution.
InfluxData’s Questionable Commitment to Open Source
To those who have been following InfluxData for some time, this may not come as a surprise. Back in 2016, the decision was made to remove clustering from InfluxDB OSS and offer it as an enterprise feature only. While the “open core” model may be necessary for InfluxData to remain profitable and support their products in the long term, removing an essential component like clustering from the OSS version shows that it is not intended for use in production environments. Without clustering, InfluxDB OSS was reduced to a testing tool or a solution for home users unconcerned with ensuring high availability.
However, even that pales in comparison to the new InfluxDB 3 Core. While InfluxDB OSS users faithfully maintained their outdated 1.x and 2.x deployments throughout 2024, waiting for word that they too would benefit from the performance enhancements already available to enterprise users, InfluxData was hard at work putting together an even more broken version of their product with which to insult their open-source community.
InfluxDB 3: No Path Forward for OSS Users
After keeping that community in the dark for over a year, InfluxData released a public alpha of their new OSS product in January 2025, which is still not ready for production. For the second time, InfluxDB has been completely rearchitected, and there is no migration path for existing users – not to mention the deprecation of Flux, once touted as a key component of InfluxDB 2. Once again, developers’ time is not respected, and they are forced to jump through hoops just to continue using the latest version of a critical component of their data stacks.
But most importantly, the new InfluxDB OSS now only supports querying three days of data. Yes, not three years, but three days. Long-term trends in data are now invisible to InfluxDB users, and they can forget about using advanced technology like ML and AI — they won’t have the datasets to support it. For the majority of users, who depend on their time-series database for real-time and historical data analysis, InfluxDB is no longer a viable open-source option.
TDengine: All In on Open Source
At TDengine, we have been “all in” on open source since the first version of our product hit GitHub back in 2019. Since that time, we have only been adding features to our open-source offerings, with clustering open-sourced in 2020 and our cloud-native version in 2022. In fact, just last year we began offering taosExplorer, our GUI and formerly an enterprise-only feature, to all OSS users — and we have more new features coming soon.
We now offer the most full-featured OSS time-series database on the market, with stream processing, caching, and data subscription included with the core functionality. Unlike InfluxDB, TDengine OSS supports clustering for high availability and poses no restrictions on how much data you can query on your own machine.
With InfluxDB refusing to provide a path forward for open-source users, download TDengine OSS today and see how easy it is to get started with our AGPL product, or view the source code on our official GitHub repository. We highly value our open-source community members and recognize that TDengine could not have achieved success without their support and contributions, and we would love for you to become part of our community.
