Cortex vs Kibana
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Kibana
Visualization and exploration for Elasticsearch data
| Feature | Cortex | Kibana |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 96 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go | TypeScript |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,865 | ★ 21,299 |
| First released | 2016 | 2013 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Grafana Cloud | Splunk, Datadog |
What are Cortex and Kibana?
Cortex
Cortex provides a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term store for Prometheus metrics. It offers a single API endpoint for querying and writing time series data across clusters.
- Multi-tenant metrics storage
- Horizontally scalable
- Prometheus-compatible API
- Long-term retention
Kibana
Kibana is a visualization and management interface for Elasticsearch, widely used for log analytics and observability. It provides dashboards, search, and alerting over indexed operational data.
- Log and metric dashboards
- Discover search interface
- Alerting and machine learning
- Maps and visualizations
Cortex vs Kibana: key differences
Cortex is written in Go, while Kibana is built with TypeScript. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Cortex versus AGPL-3.0 for Kibana. Kibana is the more established project (first released 2013), while Cortex arrived in 2016. Kibana has the considerably larger community, at 21,299 GitHub stars versus 5,865.
Why pick each one
Choose Cortex if…
- Built for very large scale
- True multi-tenancy
Watch out for
- Operationally heavy
- Overkill for small setups
Choose Kibana if…
- Rich visualization options
- Mature ecosystem
Watch out for
- Tied to Elasticsearch
- Heavy resource usage
Frequently asked questions
Is Cortex or Kibana better?
Kibana is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Cortex if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Cortex and Kibana free and open-source?
Yes. Cortex is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Kibana under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cortex and Kibana with Docker?
Cortex: yes. Kibana: yes.