Grafana Mimir vs Zabbix
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Grafana Mimir
Scalable long-term storage for Prometheus metrics
VS
Zabbix
Enterprise-grade open-source monitoring solution
| Feature | Grafana Mimir | Zabbix |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 89 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go | Go Template |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, bare-metal |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,238 | ★ 6,411 |
| First released | 2022 | 2001 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Chronosphere | Datadog, Nagios |
What are Grafana Mimir and Zabbix?
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
Zabbix
Zabbix is an enterprise-class monitoring solution for networks, servers, cloud, and applications with deep alerting. It targets organizations needing comprehensive infrastructure monitoring. It is deployed via Docker or native packages.
- Agent and agentless monitoring
- Powerful triggers and alerting
- Network discovery and maps
- Highly scalable
Grafana Mimir vs Zabbix: key differences
Grafana Mimir is written in Go, while Zabbix is built with Go Template. Zabbix is the more established project (first released 2001), while Grafana Mimir arrived in 2022.
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana Mimir if…
- Proven at billion-series scale
- Easier to operate than Cortex
Watch out for
- Resource intensive
- Complex for small homelabs
Choose Zabbix if…
- Comprehensive and mature
- Scales to large estates
- Fully free
Watch out for
- Steep learning curve
- Dated interface
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana Mimir or Zabbix better?
Neither is universally better. Zabbix has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Grafana Mimir and Zabbix free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana Mimir is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Zabbix under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana Mimir and Zabbix with Docker?
Grafana Mimir: yes. Zabbix: yes.