Kibana vs Grafana Mimir
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
VS
Grafana Mimir
Scalable long-term storage for Prometheus metrics
| Feature | Kibana | Grafana Mimir |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 96 · Excellent | 90 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | docker, kubernetes, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 21,299 | ★ 5,238 |
| First released | 2013 | 2022 |
| Replaces | Splunk, Datadog | Datadog, Chronosphere |
What are Kibana and Grafana Mimir?
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 Mimir
Grafana Mimir is an open-source, horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant time series database for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It is designed to store and query hundreds of millions of active series.
- Massive cardinality support
- Multi-tenant by design
- Fast query engine
- Object storage backend
Kibana vs Grafana Mimir: key differences
Kibana is written in TypeScript, while Grafana Mimir is built with Go. Kibana is the more established project (first released 2013), while Grafana Mimir arrived in 2022. Kibana has the considerably larger community, at 21,299 GitHub stars versus 5,238.
Why pick each one
Choose Kibana if…
- Rich visualization options
- Mature ecosystem
Watch out for
- Tied to Elasticsearch
- Heavy resource usage
Choose Grafana Mimir if…
- Proven at billion-series scale
- Easier to operate than Cortex
Watch out for
- Resource intensive
- Complex for small homelabs
Frequently asked questions
Is Kibana or Grafana Mimir better?
Kibana is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Grafana Mimir if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Kibana and Grafana Mimir free and open-source?
Yes. Kibana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Grafana Mimir under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Kibana and Grafana Mimir with Docker?
Kibana: yes. Grafana Mimir: yes.