Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Zabbix VS Kibana

Compare Zabbix VS Kibana and see what are their differences

Zabbix logo Zabbix

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

Kibana logo Kibana

Easily visualize data pushed into Elasticsearch from Logstash, es-hadoop or 3rd party technologies...
  • Zabbix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-10-02
  • Kibana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Zabbix features and specs

  • Open-source
    Zabbix is free and open-source, allowing for extensive customization and modification to meet specific needs without licensing costs.
  • Scalability
    Zabbix can handle a large number of devices and data points, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Zabbix offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including servers, networks, cloud services, and applications.
  • Alerting and Notification
    It provides robust alerting mechanisms, allowing notifications via email, SMS, and other methods.
  • Flexible Configuration
    The system allows for detailed and flexible configuration, accommodating various specific monitoring requirements.
  • Extensive API
    Zabbix comes with a comprehensive API that allows for integration with third-party tools and custom automation scripts.
  • Strong Community Support
    As an open-source project, Zabbix has a strong community that can provide support and share best practices.

Possible disadvantages of Zabbix

  • Complex Setup and Configuration
    Initial setup and configuration can be complicated and time-consuming, often requiring a steep learning curve.
  • Resource Intensive
    Zabbix can be resource-intensive, particularly on the database side, which might require substantial hardware resources for large deployments.
  • User Interface
    The user interface is considered less modern and user-friendly compared to some commercial alternatives.
  • Documentation
    While comprehensive, the documentation can sometimes be difficult to navigate for new users.
  • Maintenance Effort
    Ongoing maintenance, such as updates and troubleshooting, can be labor-intensive.
  • Dependency on MySQL
    The heavy reliance on MySQL databases can be a disadvantage for users preferring other database technologies.
  • Initial Costs for Large Scale Deployments
    Although the software is free, the costs associated with setting up and maintaining the necessary infrastructure and hardware can be significant, especially for larger deployments.

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.

Zabbix videos

An overview of Zabbix 4.0 and how we are using it.

More videos:

  • Review - Zabbix Monitoring Solution - Overview
  • Review - ZABBIX Network Discovery For Dynamic Deployments

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 Zabbix and Kibana)
Monitoring Tools
92 92%
8% 8
Log Management
91 91%
9% 9
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

Zabbix Reviews

  1. Stan
    · Founder at SaaSHub ·
    Indispensable

    Zabbix has been part of my toolbox for quite some time. I can easily say it's an indispensable tool for me now.

    Managing a dozen servers without Zabbix would be unimaginable. I'm monitoring all of this: CPU, Memory, Hard-drives, website response times, downtime. The UI might be a bit "old school", but everything works flawlessly.

    With regards to hard-drive monitoring, I love the machine learning option that allows you to "predict" the number of days before running out of space. That's quite helpful, as I've got some of my servers down due to running out of space multiple times in the past (before I was using Zabbix).

    👍 Pros:    Open-source|It can monitor everything
    👎 Cons:    The ui is a bit unintuitive in some cases

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
11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Unlimited scaling: Zabbix is a flexible software that lets you monitor anything you want. It is highly scalable as it helps you manage both multi-tenant enterprise environments and your home.
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Zabbix is a very strong competitor to Nagios and its development is very encouraging. Zabbix is completely free to use, which makes it a competitor to Nagios Core. Zabbix beats Nagios in the free monitoring market because it has a good frontend, which Nagios Core lacks and it also provides NetFlow monitoring, which isn’t present in Nagios Core – that is a separate paid...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
Zabbix, a widely adopted open-source monitoring tool, offers a range of practical features. It allows you to monitor various aspects of your system, including transactions, application performance, and real browser monitoring. With ready-to-use templates for different servers and operating systems, Zabbix simplifies the monitoring process.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Zabbix offers a unified view of the entire IT infrastructure through its user-friendly web-based interface. It delivers potent visualization capabilities through customizable dashboards, complemented by robust alerting mechanisms and comprehensive support for alert escalations.
Source: signoz.io

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, Zabbix seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 5 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.

Zabbix mentions (5)

  • Learning Resources
    Official Zabbix trainings, documentation on zabbix.com ? Source: over 2 years ago
  • zabbix installation
    Hallo, do you know a howto to install zabbix on an ubuntu 20.04 ? I tried the manuals from zabbix.com for MySQL Apache but it didn't work. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How I am getting experience as a linux admistrator (Follow Up)
    He suggested that I indeed should set up a home-lab. To be specific he said that I should create a minimal install of Centos 8 and install zabbix server on it (https://zabbix.com) and monitor a whole bunch of other VMs, services and stuff.. He said that I should set up a variety of VMs and also maybe host a website on one of them. And then if I was able to do that, I could help to share a load of zabbix related... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Ubuntu Impish 21.10 / Zabbix 6.0 LTS
    This is a fresh 21.10 install, using the install repo as detailed on the zabbix.com download page. Source: about 3 years ago
  • One dev conference speaker's family member died, need your help to fill the speaking slot on Nov 27/28
    Well, if you can't find anyone, I am more than happy to fill the slot with something regarding Zabbix - just let me know ;). Source: over 3 years ago

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 Zabbix and Kibana, you can also consider the following products

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.

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

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

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

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.