Grafana vs. Metabase

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
Metabase
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Metabase aims to bring data tools with the simplicity of consumer products to the crufty world of enterprise business intelligence. Their open source analytics and business intelligence applications connect to most commonly used databases to let anyone in a company ask questions, and create dashboards or nightly emails without knowing SQL. Metabase Enterprise enables the user to embed branded analytics into customer applications.
$85
per month (includes 5 users, then $5 per user, per month)
Pricing
GrafanaMetabase
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
Starter
$85
per month (includes 5 users, then $5 per user, per month)
Starter
$85
per month up to 5 users
Pro
$500
per month up to 10 users
Growth
$749
per month (includes 10 users, then $15 per user, per month)
Enterprise
15,000
per year
Open Source
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaMetabase
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaMetabase
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.
Metabase
Chose Metabase
It does not stack up against Metabase, they complete each other.
Chose Metabase
I used Looker in a previous role and found it clunky, difficult to navigate, hard to collaborate on, and ultimately massively expensive. I evaluated Looker to see if it would be right to implement it as a solution in my current role, but Metabase was the clear winner - the ease …
Chose Metabase
I thought Metabase was the easiest option that allowed for flexibility. However, I did need dedicated engineering resources to get the system configured and basic queries started
Features
GrafanaMetabase
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Metabase
7.5
Ratings
8% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings6.40 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
Metabase
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.10 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings9.50 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
Metabase
8.7
Ratings
5% above category average
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings00 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
Metabase
8.8
Ratings
10% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Metabase
9.5
Ratings
11% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Metabase
9.0
Ratings
14% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Metabase
8.8
Ratings
12% above category average
REST API00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaMetabase
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaMetabase
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaMetabase
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
Read full review
Getting data using query with multiple joins is very fast with Metabase, and role-based access to the reports can be provided to users. The only place it lags right now is the filter for page and page size. This comes with great support for container-based deployment and on-system deployment, too. I did both container and system direct installation, and direct deployment became a bit challenging. On the other hand, it really provides very good support for data representation.
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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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  • Store Data
  • Make Querying easy
  • Quickly ingest data from many sources
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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
Read full review
  • The layout could be more modern
  • Would be great to have a drag and drop option to build dashboards
Read full review
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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The tool serves as the purpose of what we were looking for. I am giving us eight because it is cumbersome and needs separate deployment on production; otherwise, it creates memory issues for small servers. Apart from this, this is an excellent tool, providing data features some analysts want. Its backend is heavy, but it works pretty smoothly on front-end users.
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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
It does not stack up against Metabase, they complete each other.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
  • Departmental Reporting - allows each department to measure and track KPIs
  • Visibility - everyone has access to the data they need and context on the rest of the business' goals
  • Churn - Helps to predict churn from our partners given their sales and forecasts
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ScreenShots