Grafana vs Power BI

Overview

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes415

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

Power BI

Stacks994

Followers946

Votes29

Grafana vs Power BI: What are the differences?

Introduction: Grafana and Power BI are both popular tools used for data visualization and analysis. While they have similar functionalities, there are key differences between the two that make them suitable for different use cases.

Data Sources and Integrations: Grafana is known for its extensive range of data sources and integrations. It supports a wide variety of open-source and commercial databases, cloud services, and time series databases. On the other hand, Power BI primarily focuses on Microsoft's ecosystem, providing seamless integration with popular Microsoft products like Excel, SQL Server, and Azure services.
Flexibility and Customizability: Grafana offers more flexibility and customizability in terms of visualizations and dashboards. It provides a rich set of options to design and customize dashboards, including different chart types, layouts, and themes. Power BI, although providing a good range of pre-built visualizations, has a more structured approach with fewer options for customization.
Community and Documentation: Grafana has a strong open-source community with active contributors, resulting in a vibrant ecosystem. It offers comprehensive documentation, guides, and forums that help users get started and resolve issues. Power BI, being a Microsoft product, benefits from a large user base, extensive support, and well-documented resources.
Pricing and Licensing: Grafana is open-source and free to use, making it an attractive choice for many organizations. However, some Grafana plugins or enterprise features may require licensing fees. Power BI offers different pricing tiers based on user roles and features, including a free version with limitations and paid plans with advanced functionalities.
Real-time Streaming and Monitoring: Grafana excels in real-time streaming and monitoring of metrics and logs due to its compatibility with leading time series databases. It offers features like alerts and notifications, anomaly detection, and data-driven collaboration. While Power BI supports real-time analytics, it is more suitable for analyzing static or periodic data rather than continuously streaming, high-frequency data.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Power BI is designed with a user-friendly interface and provides straightforward drag-and-drop functionalities, making it easier for business users to create visualizations and dashboards without coding knowledge. Grafana, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve, mainly targeting users with technical expertise or developer background to leverage its full capabilities.

In Summary, Grafana offers extensive data source integrations and customizability, with a strong open-source community, while Power BI focuses on seamless integration with Microsoft products, user-friendliness, and real-time analysis capabilities.

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Advice on Grafana, Power BI

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."

663k views663k

Comments

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

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.

869k views869k

Comments

Mat

Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud

Oct 30, 2019

Needs advice

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.

794k views794k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grafana	Power BI
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.	It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and 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	Get self-service analytics at enterprise scale; Use smart tools for strong results; Help protect your analytics data
Statistics
GitHub Stars 70.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 13.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 18.4K	Stacks 994
Followers 14.6K	Followers 946
Votes 415	Votes 29
Pros & Cons
Pros 89 Beautiful 68 Graphs are interactive 57 Free 56 Easy 34 Nicer than the Graphite web interface Cons 1 No interactive query builder	Pros 18 Cross-filtering 4 Database visualisation 2 Powerful Calculation Engine 2 Access from anywhere 2 Intuitive and complete internal ETL
Integrations
Graphite InfluxDB	Microsoft Excel

What are some alternatives to Grafana, Power BI?

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.

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.

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

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.

Superset

Superset's main goal is to make it easy to slice, dice and visualize data. It empowers users to perform analytics at the speed of thought.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

Related Comparisons

Grafana vs Power BI: What are the differences?

Data Sources and Integrations: Grafana is known for its extensive range of data sources and integrations. It supports a wide variety of open-source and commercial databases, cloud services, and time series databases. On the other hand, Power BI primarily focuses on Microsoft's ecosystem, providing seamless integration with popular Microsoft products like Excel, SQL Server, and Azure services.
Flexibility and Customizability: Grafana offers more flexibility and customizability in terms of visualizations and dashboards. It provides a rich set of options to design and customize dashboards, including different chart types, layouts, and themes. Power BI, although providing a good range of pre-built visualizations, has a more structured approach with fewer options for customization.
Community and Documentation: Grafana has a strong open-source community with active contributors, resulting in a vibrant ecosystem. It offers comprehensive documentation, guides, and forums that help users get started and resolve issues. Power BI, being a Microsoft product, benefits from a large user base, extensive support, and well-documented resources.
Pricing and Licensing: Grafana is open-source and free to use, making it an attractive choice for many organizations. However, some Grafana plugins or enterprise features may require licensing fees. Power BI offers different pricing tiers based on user roles and features, including a free version with limitations and paid plans with advanced functionalities.
Real-time Streaming and Monitoring: Grafana excels in real-time streaming and monitoring of metrics and logs due to its compatibility with leading time series databases. It offers features like alerts and notifications, anomaly detection, and data-driven collaboration. While Power BI supports real-time analytics, it is more suitable for analyzing static or periodic data rather than continuously streaming, high-frequency data.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Power BI is designed with a user-friendly interface and provides straightforward drag-and-drop functionalities, making it easier for business users to create visualizations and dashboards without coding knowledge. Grafana, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve, mainly targeting users with technical expertise or developer background to leverage its full capabilities.

Grafana vs Power BI

Overview