Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Grafana VS Kibana

Compare Grafana VS Kibana and see what are their differences

Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Kibana logo Kibana

Easily visualize data pushed into Elasticsearch from Logstash, es-hadoop or 3rd party technologies...
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Kibana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Grafana

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
Release Date
2014 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
New York
City
New York
Founder(s)
Anthony Woods
Employees
100 - 249

Grafana features and specs

  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages of Grafana

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.

Kibana features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Kibana features an intuitive and visually appealing interface, making it easier for users to explore and visualize data without requiring in-depth technical knowledge.
  • Powerful Visualizations
    Offers a wide variety of visualizations including bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and heat maps, enabling comprehensive data analysis and insights.
  • Real-Time Data Analysis
    Allows for the real-time monitoring and analysis of data, providing immediate insights and helping in quick decision-making processes.
  • Integration with Elastic Stack
    Seamlessly integrates with Elasticsearch and other components of the Elastic Stack, ensuring smooth data ingestion, storage, and retrieval.
  • Custom Dashboards
    Provides the ability to create and customize dashboards, allowing users to tailor visualizations to meet specific business needs and preferences.
  • Timelion Plugin
    The Timelion plugin offers advanced time-series analysis capabilities, enabling users to perform more complex data manipulations and visualizations.
  • Extensible Platform
    Highly extensible through plugins and APIs, allowing users to add new features and integrate with other tools and services.
  • Alerting and Reporting
    Includes built-in alerting and reporting features which help in proactively managing systems and sharing insights with stakeholders.

Possible disadvantages of Kibana

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    While user-friendly, getting the most out of Kibana can require a significant learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with data visualization or Elasticsearch.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    Kibana can experience performance degradation when handling very large datasets, which may affect the responsiveness and usability of the platform.
  • Limited Advanced Data Analysis
    Although it offers robust visualization capabilities, Kibana lacks some advanced analytical features available in specialized data analysis tools.
  • Complex Setup and Maintenance
    Setting up and maintaining Kibana, especially in a production environment, can be complex and time-consuming, often requiring dedicated resources.
  • Cost
    While the basic version of Kibana is free, advanced features available in the paid (premium) versions can be quite costly, which might be a limitation for small businesses.
  • Limited Customization
    Although quite flexible, Kibana has some limitations in terms of customization options for specific visualizations and user interfaces.
  • Dependency on Elasticsearch
    Kibana relies heavily on Elasticsearch for data retrieval and storage, meaning any issues with Elasticsearch can directly impact Kibana's performance and functionality.

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

  • Review - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • Review - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

Kibana videos

Analyzing Server Logs with Kibana

More videos:

  • Review - Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Grafana and Kibana)
Monitoring Tools
87 87%
13% 13
Data Dashboard
92 92%
8% 8
Log Management
81 81%
19% 19
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Grafana and Kibana

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though it’s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since you’ve landed yourself here, I’m guessing that you’re one of those people. Fear not! We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafana’s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Kibana Reviews

Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Assess how well the Grafana alternative integrates with your existing tools stack. For instance, Kibana is best suited for Elasticsearch environments, while Middleware is the most advanced solution to operate and monitor in Kubernetes environments.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Kibana is an integral component within the Elastic Stack (ELK), offering advanced visualization and analysis capabilities. Beats, which is also a part of the ELK Stack, is responsible for collecting and forwarding log data to Logstash for initial processing. Logstash, in turn, applies various data transformations and subsequently stores the processed data in Elasticsearch....
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Lastly, the Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) is a well-known tool for Linux performance monitoring. It’s composed of Elasticsearch (full-text search), Logstash (a log aggregator), Kibana (visualization via graphs and charts), and Beats (lightweight metrics collectors and shippers).
Source: sematext.com
4 Best Open Source Dashboard Monitoring Tools In 2019
Kibana is part of Elastic’s product suite and is often used in what we call an ELK stack : ElasticSearch + Logstash + Kibana.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 237 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Grafana mentions (237)

View more

Kibana mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Kibana yet. Tracking of Kibana recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Grafana and Kibana, you can also consider the following products

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Splunk - Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.