Kibana vs Pushgateway
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
Pushgateway
Push acceptor for ephemeral and batch job metrics
| Feature | Kibana | Pushgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 96 · Excellent | 87 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 32 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 21,299 | ★ 3,369 |
| First released | 2013 | 2015 |
| Replaces | Splunk, Datadog | Datadog |
What are Kibana and Pushgateway?
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
Pushgateway
The Prometheus Pushgateway allows ephemeral and batch jobs to expose their metrics to Prometheus. Jobs push metrics to the gateway, which Prometheus then scrapes on its regular schedule.
- Accepts pushed metrics
- Bridges batch jobs to Prometheus
- Persists metrics to disk
- Tiny footprint
Kibana vs Pushgateway: key differences
Kibana is written in TypeScript, while Pushgateway is built with Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Kibana versus Apache-2.0 for Pushgateway. Pushgateway is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 1,024 MB for Kibana. Kibana is the more established project (first released 2013), while Pushgateway arrived in 2015. Kibana has the considerably larger community, at 21,299 GitHub stars versus 3,369.
Why pick each one
Choose Kibana if…
- Rich visualization options
- Mature ecosystem
Watch out for
- Tied to Elasticsearch
- Heavy resource usage
Choose Pushgateway if…
- Solves batch job monitoring
- Simple to run
Watch out for
- Not for high-frequency metrics
- Can become a single point of failure
Frequently asked questions
Is Kibana or Pushgateway better?
Neither is universally better. Kibana has the larger community, while Pushgateway is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Kibana and Pushgateway free and open-source?
Yes. Kibana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Pushgateway under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Kibana and Pushgateway with Docker?
Kibana: yes. Pushgateway: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Kibana or Pushgateway?
Pushgateway has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 1,024 MB for Kibana. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.