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Grafana vs Metabase: What are the differences?

Grafana and Metabase are two popular data visualization and analytics tools. Let's explore the key differences between them:

  1. Architecture: Grafana is a standalone application that focuses primarily on visualizing time series data from various data sources. It provides a wide range of visualization options and is known for its flexibility and extensibility. Metabase, on the other hand, is a lightweight application that aims to simplify data exploration and analysis for non-technical users. It focuses on providing an intuitive and easy-to-use interface with limited customization options, making it more suitable for quick insights.

  2. Data sources: Grafana supports a wide variety of data sources, including databases, cloud services, monitoring tools, and more. It provides plugins and APIs for integrating with different datasources, enabling users to create complex visualizations and dashboards. Metabase, on the other hand, has a limited number of supported data sources out-of-the-box. It is primarily designed for connecting to databases and performing simple queries without requiring SQL knowledge.

  3. User Interface: Grafana offers a highly customizable user interface with drag-and-drop capabilities, allowing users to create interactive dashboards with graphs, tables, and alerts. It provides a rich set of features for data exploration, filtering, and drilling down into specific data points. Metabase, on the other hand, offers a simpler user interface focused on ease of use and self-service analytics. It provides predefined visualizations and templates to quickly generate insights without requiring any technical skills.

  4. Security and Access Control: Grafana provides robust security features with multi-user authentication, granular access control, and integration with external identity providers. It allows fine-grained control over who can access and modify dashboards and data sources. Metabase, on the other hand, has limited security features and is more suitable for small teams or organizations where strict access control is not a requirement.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a large and active community of developers and users, which has resulted in a rich ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and integrations. It has an extensive marketplace where users can find and download ready-to-use dashboards and panels. Metabase, on the other hand, has a smaller community and a more limited ecosystem. While it provides some level of extensibility, it lacks the breadth of options available in Grafana.

  6. Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning: Grafana provides limited support for advanced analytics and machine learning out-of-the-box. It focuses primarily on visualizing and analyzing time series data. Metabase, on the other hand, lacks advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities altogether. It is more suitable for basic data exploration and visualization, rather than advanced analytics use cases.

In summary, Grafana is a flexible and extensible data visualization tool with a wide range of supported data sources, advanced analytics capabilities, and a large community. Metabase, on the other hand, is a lightweight and intuitive tool focused on simplicity and ease of use, with limited customization options and a smaller community.

Advice on Grafana and Metabase
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 777.5K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 562.8K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 707K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

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Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

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Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

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Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafana
and
KibanaKibana

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."

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Replies (7)
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana

Kibana has predictions and ML algorithms support, so if you need them, you may be better off with Kibana . The multi-variate analysis features it provide are very unique (not available in Grafana).

For everything else, definitely Grafana . Especially the number of supported data sources, and plugins clearly makes Grafana a winner (in just visualization and reporting sense). Creating your own plugin is also very easy. The top pros of Grafana (which it does better than Kibana ) are:

  • Creating and organizing visualization panels
  • Templating the panels on dashboards for repetetive tasks
  • Realtime monitoring, filtering of charts based on conditions and variables
  • Export / Import in JSON format (that allows you to version and save your dashboard as part of git)
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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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

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Bram Verdonck
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

After looking for a way to monitor or at least get a better overview of our infrastructure, we found out that Grafana (which I previously only used in ELK stacks) has a plugin available to fully integrate with Amazon CloudWatch . Which makes it way better for our use-case than the offer of the different competitors (most of them are even paid). There is also a CloudFlare plugin available, the platform we use to serve our DNS requests. Although we are a big fan of https://smashing.github.io/ (previously dashing), for now we are starting with Grafana .

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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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.

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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

Kibana should be sufficient in this architecture for decent analytics, if stronger metrics is needed then combine with Grafana. Datadog also offers nice overview but there's no need for it in this case unless you need more monitoring and alerting (and more technicalities).

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Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

I use Grafana because it is without a doubt the best way to visualize metrics

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Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 588.7K views
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana
at

@Kibana, of course, because @Grafana looks like amateur sort of solution, crammed with query builder grouping aggregates, but in essence, as recommended by CERN - KIbana is the corporate (startup vectored) decision.

Furthermore, @Kibana comes with complexity adhering ELK stack, whereas @InfluxDB + @Grafana & co. recently have become sophisticated development conglomerate instead of advancing towards a understandable installation step by step inheritance.

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Pros of Grafana
Pros of Metabase
  • 89
    Beautiful
  • 68
    Graphs are interactive
  • 57
    Free
  • 56
    Easy
  • 34
    Nicer than the Graphite web interface
  • 26
    Many integrations
  • 18
    Can build dashboards
  • 10
    Easy to specify time window
  • 10
    Can collaborate on dashboards
  • 9
    Dashboards contain number tiles
  • 5
    Open Source
  • 5
    Integration with InfluxDB
  • 5
    Click and drag to zoom in
  • 4
    Authentification and users management
  • 4
    Threshold limits in graphs
  • 3
    Alerts
  • 3
    It is open to cloud watch and many database
  • 3
    Simple and native support to Prometheus
  • 2
    Great community support
  • 2
    You can use this for development to check memcache
  • 2
    You can visualize real time data to put alerts
  • 0
    Grapsh as code
  • 0
    Plugin visualizationa
  • 61
    Database visualisation
  • 44
    Open Source
  • 41
    Easy setup
  • 36
    Dashboard out of the box
  • 22
    Free
  • 14
    Simple
  • 9
    Support for many dbs
  • 7
    Easy embedding
  • 6
    It's good
  • 6
    Easy
  • 5
    AGPL : wont help with adoption but depends on your goal
  • 5
    BI doesn't get easier than that
  • 4
    Google analytics integration
  • 4
    Multiple integrations
  • 4
    Easy set up

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Cons of Grafana
Cons of Metabase
  • 1
    No interactive query builder
  • 6
    Harder to setup than similar tools

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is Grafana?

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.

What is Metabase?

It is an easy way to generate charts and dashboards, ask simple ad hoc queries without using SQL, and see detailed information about rows in your Database. You can set it up in under 5 minutes, and then give yourself and others a place to ask simple questions and understand the data your application is generating.

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What are some alternatives to Grafana and Metabase?
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!
Kibana
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.
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.
Graphite
Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand
Splunk
It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
See all alternatives