AppSignal vs Grafana vs Kibana

Overview

AppSignal

Stacks97

Followers100

Votes88

Kibana

Stacks20.6K

Followers16.4K

Votes262

GitHub Stars20.8K

Forks8.5K

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes416

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

AppSignal vs Grafana vs Kibana: What are the differences?

Cost: AppSignal has a straightforward pricing model based on the number of hosts being monitored, while Grafana and Kibana are open-source solutions with no direct cost for the software. However, there can be additional costs for hosting, maintenance, and support for Grafana and Kibana.
Feature Set: AppSignal is more focused on application performance monitoring and error tracking, offering detailed insights into server-side performance. On the other hand, Grafana and Kibana are more comprehensive analytics and visualization tools that can handle data from various sources and provide dashboarding capabilities.
Customization: Grafana and Kibana are highly customizable tools that allow users to create their own visualizations and dashboards using different data sources and plugins. In contrast, AppSignal has a more structured approach with pre-built monitoring solutions tailored for specific languages and frameworks.
Community Support: Grafana and Kibana benefit from large and active open-source communities that contribute plugins, integrations, and support resources. AppSignal, being a commercial product, has dedicated support from the vendor but may lack the same level of community-driven enhancements.
Ease of Use: AppSignal is known for its user-friendly interface and quick setup process, making it ideal for developers looking for a plug-and-play monitoring solution. Grafana and Kibana, with their extensive customization options, can have a steeper learning curve but offer more flexibility in the long run.
Data Sources: Grafana and Kibana support a wide range of data sources, including databases, cloud services, and IoT devices, making them versatile tools for data visualization and monitoring. AppSignal, in comparison, focuses primarily on application-specific data sources, limiting its scope to server-side performance metrics.

In Summary, AppSignal is a specialized application performance monitoring tool with a straightforward pricing model, while Grafana and Kibana are open-source, highly customizable tools with a broader scope and community support.

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Advice on AppSignal, Kibana, Grafana

matteo1989it

Jun 26, 2019

Reviewon

Kibana

Grafana

Elasticsearch

I use both Kibana and Grafana on my workplace: Kibana for logging and Grafana for monitoring. Since you already work with Elasticsearch, I think Kibana is the safest choice in terms of ease of use and variety of messages it can manage, while Grafana has still (in my opinion) a strong link to metrics

757k views757k

Comments

StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

664k views664k

Comments

abrahamfathman

Jun 26, 2019

Reviewon

Kibana

Splunk

Grafana

I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.

2.29M views2.29M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

AppSignal	Kibana	Grafana
AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.	Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.	Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
Track errors; Performance Monitoring; Compare deploys. Monitor background jobs.; Lots of integrations.; Compare servers.; Alerts for you and your team.; API with access to your data and errors.; Beautiful clean interface.; Sensible pricing (pay for requests).; Unlimited users, apps, environments, hosts.; No aggressive sales team.; Stroopwafels.; Extensive documentation.; Dedicated, private slack support.	Flexible analytics and visualization platform;Real-time summary and charting of streaming data;Intuitive interface for a variety of users;Instant sharing and embedding of dashboards	Create, edit, save & search dashboards;Change column spans and row heights;Drag and drop panels to rearrange;Use InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as dashboard storage;Import & export dashboard (json file);Import dashboard from Graphite;Templating
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 20.8K	GitHub Stars 70.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 8.5K	GitHub Forks 13.1K
Stacks 97	Stacks 20.6K	Stacks 18.4K
Followers 100	Followers 16.4K	Followers 14.6K
Votes 88	Votes 262	Votes 416
Pros & Cons
Pros 16 Easy setup 9 Logs Errors 8 Tracks performance 7 Elixir support out of the box 7 Support Elixir	Pros 88 Easy to setup 65 Free 45 Can search text 21 Has pie chart 13 X-axis is not restricted to timestamp Cons 7 Unintuituve 4 Works on top of elastic only 4 Elasticsearch is huge 3 Hardweight UI	Pros 89 Beautiful 68 Graphs are interactive 57 Free 56 Easy 34 Nicer than the Graphite web interface Cons 1 No interactive query builder
Integrations
GitHub Heroku Phabricator Shortcut Jira GitLab Slack Trello Asana Intercom	Logstash Elasticsearch Beats	Graphite InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to AppSignal, Kibana, Grafana?

New Relic

The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.

Datadog

Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

AppDynamics

AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Stackify

Stackify offers the only developers-friendly innovative cloud based solution that fully integrates application performance management (APM) with error and log. Allowing them to easily monitor, detect and resolve application issues faster

Related Comparisons

AppSignal vs Grafana vs Kibana: What are the differences?

Cost: AppSignal has a straightforward pricing model based on the number of hosts being monitored, while Grafana and Kibana are open-source solutions with no direct cost for the software. However, there can be additional costs for hosting, maintenance, and support for Grafana and Kibana.
Feature Set: AppSignal is more focused on application performance monitoring and error tracking, offering detailed insights into server-side performance. On the other hand, Grafana and Kibana are more comprehensive analytics and visualization tools that can handle data from various sources and provide dashboarding capabilities.
Customization: Grafana and Kibana are highly customizable tools that allow users to create their own visualizations and dashboards using different data sources and plugins. In contrast, AppSignal has a more structured approach with pre-built monitoring solutions tailored for specific languages and frameworks.
Community Support: Grafana and Kibana benefit from large and active open-source communities that contribute plugins, integrations, and support resources. AppSignal, being a commercial product, has dedicated support from the vendor but may lack the same level of community-driven enhancements.
Ease of Use: AppSignal is known for its user-friendly interface and quick setup process, making it ideal for developers looking for a plug-and-play monitoring solution. Grafana and Kibana, with their extensive customization options, can have a steeper learning curve but offer more flexibility in the long run.
Data Sources: Grafana and Kibana support a wide range of data sources, including databases, cloud services, and IoT devices, making them versatile tools for data visualization and monitoring. AppSignal, in comparison, focuses primarily on application-specific data sources, limiting its scope to server-side performance metrics.

AppSignal vs Grafana vs Kibana

Overview