SHSelfHostIndex

GoAccess vs Kibana

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
GO GoAccess Real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer VS KI Kibana Visualization and exploration for Elasticsearch data
FeatureGoAccessKibana
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseMITAGPL-3.0
LanguageCTypeScript
Setup difficultyEasyMedium
Min. RAM64 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, binarydocker, kubernetes, binary
GitHub stars★ 20,762★ 21,230
First released20102013
ReplacesGoogle AnalyticsSplunk, Datadog

Why pick each one

Choose GoAccess if…

  • Extremely fast and lightweight
  • Works fully offline
GoAccess details

Choose Kibana if…

  • Rich visualization options
  • Mature ecosystem
Kibana details

Frequently asked questions

Is GoAccess or Kibana better?

Neither is universally better. Kibana has the larger community, while GoAccess is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are GoAccess and Kibana free and open-source?

Yes. GoAccess is licensed under MIT and Kibana under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run GoAccess and Kibana with Docker?

GoAccess: yes. Kibana: yes.

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