Grafana vs. Yellowfin

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
Yellowfin
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Yellowfin is a cloud-based business intelligence and dashboarding platform.N/A
Pricing
GrafanaYellowfin
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
GrafanaYellowfin
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaYellowfin
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.
Yellowfin
Chose Yellowfin
Alteryx Platform, Microsoft BI (MSBI) and Tableau Desktop
Chose Yellowfin
Tableau Online, Google Analytics and Amazon QuickSight
Chose Yellowfin
Yellow Fin platform is browser agnostic and is accessible from desktops as well as mobile devices. It is very simple and fast, it is integrated with Big Data, clients do not require a great training. It just works. But it’s easier to have things on the cloud, especially if you …
Chose Yellowfin
Yellowfin is much improved over this product, making the process much more simple and faster.
Chose Yellowfin
Yellowfin is no doubt, a stronger, more eloquent and polished tool compared to Microsoft's Power BI. The issue with our company specifically is that we are a big Microsoft shop, and pay for Power BI more or less in our bundle esp w/ O365. While the Yellowfin tool is a more …
Chose Yellowfin
I feel like it is not as good as powerslides, basically does the same thing but not as well. The team basically found that it was using up more time and wasn't as easy to figure out as powerslide. We ended up switching programs after a while and still looking for a much better …
Chose Yellowfin
The Yellowfin product technologies are superior and offers more flexibility in application. The Yellowfin product can be used in several different areas such a report engine over and above being a solid business intelligence tool. It further needs significant IT overhead to be …
Chose Yellowfin
We ran a full procurement project to select Yellowfin and started with a long list of over 20 BI products. Key reasons for choice were ease of use, visual looks, product integrations and cost (both licence purchase and development of content).
Chose Yellowfin
Yellowfin BI has a strong focus on a clear structured and easy to use user interface. Furthermore, the licence model was adequate for a BI system with a lot of end users.
Chose Yellowfin
Our reporting group uses Tableau extensively and compared to Yellowfin, Tableau is much easier to use (partially because more time was invested in setting it up properly, but also the design and features).
Chose Yellowfin
My selection of Yellowfin based on following criteria for the Indian market:

  • Availability in Linux platform to process high volume of transaction with CAL (concurrent user access license) model to use multiple server with high concurrent users
Features
GrafanaYellowfin
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Yellowfin
6.1
Ratings
29% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings5.80 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings6.20 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
Yellowfin
6.6
Ratings
20% below category average
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings6.60 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.10 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings6.50 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
Yellowfin
5.9
Ratings
34% below category average
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings6.20 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings5.80 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings5.60 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings5.50 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
Yellowfin
5.8
Ratings
32% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings5.70 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings5.80 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Yellowfin
6.2
Ratings
31% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Yellowfin
6.7
Ratings
16% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings6.20 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings6.20 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Yellowfin
6.1
Ratings
24% below category average
REST API00 Ratings6.10 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings5.40 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaYellowfin
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
GrafanaYellowfin
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
6.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
6.3
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.6
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaYellowfin
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
We can recommend this software without hesitation, as it has the ability to generate reports and data analysis, as well as process the data automatically, which saves time. It is ideal for small and medium-sized companies that wish to improve their services in the business world
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
  • The Yellowfin user interface fits seamlessly into our own web software as it too is designed in the latest web technologies making it easy to use and easily accessible to our client base.
  • The Yellowfin user interface is intuitive and easy to use, elevating VSV clients from needing in-depth training on the product before true value can be realised.
  • The Yellowfin architecture supports the Pintl architecture 100% due to a similar design strategy and as such no real overhead is added to the Pintl system for the addition of the Yellowfin product nor does it add any additional IT overhead to be used.
  • The Yellowfin product is quick and simple to develop reports and dashboards in cutting turn-around-time at the VSV development team and when new/custom reports are required by VSV clients.
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
  • The ability to predefine a colour for a specific graph as a selection option dynamically.
  • The ability to customise the label of a chart, especially with respect to performance related reporting graphs we need an increase in dynamic charting options to meet our more specialised requirements.
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
Read full review
Yellowfin has large promises that did not meet our expectations after we got it installed. We tried to configure it but things did not go as planned. After 1 year of trying - we still cannot get it working. Be very careful when signing up with them - everything is not what it seems.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
99.9% availability
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Anytime I needed a report, I ran into issues with this software. We used Yellowfin for a period of months, having switched from Salesforce. I found the reports were difficult to produce, and the data management was okay at best.
Read full review
In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
Yellowfin provides 3 levels of training to support consumers, business analytics, developers and Administrations :
  1. Yellowfin BI Training - Level 1 (Exploration)
  2. Yellowfin BI Training - Level 2 (Advanced)
  3. Yellowfin BI Training - Level 3(Expert)
Read full review
Online Training
No answers on this topic
Web-based training for large audiences for Level 1 and Level 2 I would suggest
Read full review
Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Design the data model and views for each dashboard is very important and it is the success factor Configuration of cluster for large implementation
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
Yellowfin is no doubt, a stronger, more eloquent and polished tool compared to Microsoft's Power BI. The issue with our company specifically is that we are a big Microsoft shop, and pay for Power BI more or less in our bundle esp w/ O365. While the Yellowfin tool is a more sleek tool, the cost to our company is something that we have to weight against a negligible cost with Power BI.
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
- Tested 500 con-current users in Linux platform with 4 cores systems - Tested with cloud based VM - Tested with 1000 reads per minutes
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
  • made our org more data centric
  • Decisions are made based on data vs opinion
  • has created a single source of truth for the bulk of the organization
Read full review
ScreenShots

Yellowfin Screenshots

Screenshot of Location IntelligenceScreenshot of Yellowfin DashboardScreenshot of Yellowfin SignalsScreenshot of Yellowfin MobileScreenshot of Yellowfin Sales KPIs