SHSelfHostIndex

Kibana vs Telegraf

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?
KI Kibana Visualization and exploration for Elasticsearch data VS TE Telegraf Plugin-driven server agent for collecting metrics
FeatureKibanaTelegraf
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0MIT
LanguageTypeScriptGo
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM1,024 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, binarydocker, kubernetes, binary
GitHub stars★ 21,230★ 17,736
First released20132015
ReplacesSplunk, DatadogDatadog Agent

Why pick each one

Choose Kibana if…

  • Rich visualization options
  • Mature ecosystem
Kibana details

Choose Telegraf if…

  • Huge plugin catalog
  • Trivial to deploy
Telegraf details

Frequently asked questions

Is Kibana or Telegraf better?

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

Are Kibana and Telegraf free and open-source?

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

Can I run Kibana and Telegraf with Docker?

Kibana: yes. Telegraf: yes.

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