Grafana vs. Prometheus

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
Prometheus
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Prometheus is a service monitoring and time series database, which is open source.N/A
Pricing
GrafanaPrometheus
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
GrafanaPrometheus
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
GrafanaPrometheus
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.
Prometheus
Chose Prometheus
It is easier to setup, but learning curve is quite moderately steep. Prometheus is a best-in-class tool for engineers and SREs in cloud-native environments. When extended with tools like Thanos or Cortex, it can rival commercial platforms in scale and capability—but requires …
Chose Prometheus
As I mentioned earlier, Prometheus had an added advantage that we were able to monitor CPU, RAM, Disk Space, process monitoring which other tools did not provide us
Some tools were obsolete, and other were costly when we wanted this good feature , only Prometheus delivered on …
Chose Prometheus
We considered TICK stack as an alternative to our Prometheus/Grafana setup that we have for capturing, storing and visualizing the time series data.
But it seemed more complicated to learn and required a separate DB called InfluxDB to be setup.
So, after all these considerations, …
Chose Prometheus
The software is very lightweight and can be hosted with minimal resource usage. Many exporters exist for various software. Prometheus has a powerful and flexible query language (PromQL) that allows analyzing your data easy. I use this software with its various exporters, …
Chose Prometheus
Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with …
Chose Prometheus
Since Prometheus is free to use and provides all the features we required we went with Prometheus if any feature is missing then we can consider other paid solutions like data dog.
Chose Prometheus
It was easy to implement in our enviroment compared to the other products which has a lot of challenges in the POC period it self. We have been looking for a quick solution as it was implemented during COVID, hence we were trying to take advantage of this software to see how it …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus was built to monitor CLOUD infrastructure. InfluxDB also has a good design to monitor time series but does not have a design for these demands. InfluxDB would need customization to integrate with Grafana and other third-party solutions. A disadvantage of InfluxDB is …
Chose Prometheus
Both were present in the toolset. Splunk Enterprise was used in more of the log observability tool than the monitoring of the service. Prometheus was used mainly on the server and services monitoring and alerting capability used to have a stable production environment. …
Chose Prometheus
Out of all the products that we did POC, Prometheus was the easiest to integrate the tool with our storage grid on which some of our most business-critical application workflows run. Prometheus was not only able to solve the monitoring problem but also provided a variety of …
Chose Prometheus
The installation of Nagios core is quite difficult and the whole system seems us like a huge headache for us the entire team is not much happy with Nagios core so we take the decision and switch to Prometheus and were really happy with our decision and satisfied.
Chose Prometheus
We used Grafana and Prometheus to take advantage of both tools' features (ex. alerting, and visualization with Grafana).
Chose Prometheus
prometheus brings the power of real-time graphs to the land of open source ( reference included ). It's lightweight and doesn't seem overkill if you're a startup company and do not have a heavy traffic load. Great for starting out on small to mid-scale. as traffic rises, you …
Chose Prometheus
The reason Prometheus stands tall against its competitions is because it is generic. Hence, it can be used to monitor all kinds of services, be it Database, Servers etc. Whereas CloudWatch only monitors over AWS services. Another reason is its huge availability of integrations …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus is great for quantifiable metrics. Loki is intended for log aggregation. Depending on project a different combination of data source types may be needed. However, quantifiable metrics are predominantly supported by Prometheus. Other data sources like elastic search …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus is better as a monitoring tool than graphite as graphite is a passive time series database with a query language. Prometheus has a rich data model by capturing metadata with labels which allows for easy filtering and querying. For a clustered solution, graphite maybe …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus is cheaper, and you can quickly set it up compared to others. It is integrated with most of the open-source monitoring and alerting tools and can help small companies in having a cost-effective solution early in their stage.
Chose Prometheus
I tested out this solution and vetted out a few other solutions as well and ultimately ended up going with Prometheus due to a few specific reasons. Prometheus has a freemium option that allows a company to maintain cash flow while not sacrificing the quality of the product. It …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus is similar to some of its competitors but delivers with regards to metrics; being used internally by Google and other cloud-native companies like ours gives us the confidence that the alerting industry stakeholders view it as a long-term solution that the community …
Chose Prometheus
We evaluated Datadog and New Relic but cost-wise, these 2 are very expensive. Prometheus does require more leg work to match the feature sets but other than time, the cost is free. Pairing with Grafana, Prometheus can pretty much match features with the big players and still …
Chose Prometheus
If you combine Prometheus with Grafana, what you get is just amazing. it is basically the best ecosystem that I have seen. Grafana just makes those fancy "iron man" kind of dashboards and it just looks so appealing to your eyes. I have implemented NAGIOS core earlier for …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus is best suited for Kubernetes metrics as compared to Zabbix.
Features
GrafanaPrometheus
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings00 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
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings00 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
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaPrometheus
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaPrometheus
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaPrometheus
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
This program works from the roots of the problem and creates a professional matrix for each of its users. This will give them more skills and resources to carry out tasks and reduce the difficulties of operating each of the processes of my work, as well as being An ally for the manipulation and operability of all your master data; Prometheus is very easy to recommend since it is a program that fulfills its mission.
Read full review
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
Read full review
  • Looking at metrics such as the aggregate number of HTTP requests served.
  • Understanding how our services are performing in aggregate.
  • Easy to deploy within a variety of architectures/environments.
  • Open source so new features are added regularly and bugs are fixed in a timely manner.
  • Free so there are no licensing restrictions.
  • Endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Read full review
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
  • Customer Service: since this is an open-source tool, customer service is not that great. Generally, you get all answers to your problems in online forums, but in case you got stuck, nobody will assist you in a channelised manner. You will have to find the way out on your own, and it may become frustrating at times.
  • More metrics for dashboards shall be added per the application being monitored. Standards metrics will work in most cases but may not in specific applications. Therefore, customised metrics shall be created for some of the industry-standard niche applications.
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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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It is usable and one can learn if few people in the team are already using it. It can be difficult to understand at the beginning because of non intuitive UI and syntax of the rules. So, I've gone for 7 points as there is some room for improvement in user interface and rules syntax.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Never had to reach out to them.
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
Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with Grafana. It also has a sophisticated alert setting mechanism to ensure we don't miss anything critical.
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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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  • We are still working on the ROI
  • The ROI mentioned during the purchase has not been achieved, however this could be due to lack of data from our side. 2 years of implementation is too early to calculate and confirm the ROI.
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ScreenShots