Grafana vs. Kibana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Kibana
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Kibana allows users to visualize Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack so you can do anything from tracking query load to understanding the way requests flow through your apps.N/A
Pricing
GrafanaKibana
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaKibana
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaKibana
Considered Both Products
Grafana
Chose Grafana
Easy to use
Easy to configure
Cost efficient
Chose Grafana
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't …
Chose Grafana
Grafana gives more flexibility to explore its features. A new user can explore experiment and work with free Grafana account and find if it is suitable for them.Other platforms don't have the features in their freemium version that Grafana has. It lets us try features of …
Chose Grafana
Grafana has a direct plugin to Icinga monitoring solution and allowed for easy configuration for us. At the time of implementation, other services did not have such an integration. As we already had a very customized and heavily introduced monitoring solution in place, we …
Chose Grafana
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Kibana
Chose Kibana
Well when it comes to using Kibana when compared to Datadog, I can say that Kibana is pretty [...] cheap. Apart from APM and Datadog hosted agents, Kibana gives a good competition to Datadog for real time log analysis as well as metrics analysis.
While OpsGenie is a great tool …
Chose Kibana
Stackdriver and CloudWatch are not as intuitive and easy-to-use as Kibana, and do not offer such advanced filtering capabilities.

Google BigQuery is not really suitable for real-time searches.
Features
GrafanaKibana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Kibana
9.0
Ratings
7% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
Kibana
5.7
Ratings
33% below category average
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
Ratings
0% below category average
Kibana
8.8
Ratings
4% above category average
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.7
Ratings
6% below category average
Kibana
8.8
Ratings
8% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaKibana
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaKibana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaKibana
Likelihood to Recommend
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
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Great for teams big and small that want a single pane of glass for understanding their systems, from dev, to staging, to production. Well-suited for teams that need to preserve logs for long-term compliance reasons, and also mine their logs for useful operational insights. Highly recommended as both an open source project and a commercial offering with fantastic paid support.
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Pros
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
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  • searching
  • near real-time
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Cons
  • Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
  • Notification alert message templates need to be simplified
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  • Improved tutorial/ user guidance
  • Improved labeling for sources
  • Ease of login and sharing with coworkers
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Usability
Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors
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Its usability is generally good and it provides teams with a basic to intermediate understanding about data visualization. It is very user-friendly when it comes to creating dashboards. The UI is very good and simple. Its integration with other tools for alerting and reporting is amazing. But its advance features have a learning curve and a first timer needs some time to use the advance features.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
I have not contacted Kibana support.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors
Read full review
Well when it comes to using Kibana when compared to Datadog, I can say that Kibana is pretty [...] cheap. Apart from APM and Datadog hosted agents, Kibana gives a good competition to Datadog for real time log analysis as well as metrics analysis. While OpsGenie is a great tool for alerting, it lacks visualization when compared to Kibana. Grafana is another opensource tool that gives a lot of insights like Kibana but Grafana cannot be easily integrated with OpenSearch.
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Return on Investment
  • It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
  • Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
  • It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.
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  • First stop when diagnosing production performance issues.
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ScreenShots