Grafana vs Kibana
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Grafana
Open observability dashboards and visualization
VS
Kibana
Visualization and exploration for Elasticsearch data
| Feature | Grafana | Kibana |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | ≈5-minute setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 100 · Excellent | 96 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 76,876 | ★ 21,299 |
| First released | 2014 | 2013 |
| Replaces | Datadog | Splunk, Datadog |
What are Grafana and Kibana?
Grafana
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that builds dashboards from many data sources. It targets operators and analysts who need rich observability dashboards. It is deployed via Docker, packages, or Helm.
- Dashboards from many data sources
- Alerting and annotations
- Large plugin ecosystem
- Templating and variables
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
Grafana vs Kibana: key differences
Both projects are written in TypeScript. Grafana is the lighter option, starting around 512 MB of RAM against 1,024 MB for Kibana. Grafana has the considerably larger community, at 76,876 GitHub stars versus 21,299.
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana if…
- Beautiful flexible dashboards
- Broad data source support
- Strong community
Watch out for
- Not a data store itself
- Alerting can be complex
Choose Kibana if…
- Rich visualization options
- Mature ecosystem
Watch out for
- Tied to Elasticsearch
- Heavy resource usage
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana or Kibana better?
Neither is universally better. Grafana has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Grafana and Kibana free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Kibana under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana and Kibana with Docker?
Grafana: yes. Kibana: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Grafana or Kibana?
Grafana has the smaller minimum footprint at 512 MB of RAM, compared to about 1,024 MB for Kibana. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.