Overview

Tableau

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.4K

Votes8

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes415

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

Grafana vs Tableau: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between Grafana and Tableau. Both Grafana and Tableau are widely used data visualization tools, but they have distinct features and functionalities that set them apart from each other.

Data Source Connectivity: Grafana primarily focuses on monitoring and observability and provides support for a wide range of data sources, including databases, time series data, cloud storage, and APIs. On the other hand, Tableau offers connectivity to various data sources as well, but it is more focused on traditional business intelligence and analytics, offering robust integration with commonly used data sources such as databases, spreadsheets, and cloud platforms.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Grafana is known for its user-friendly interface and ease of use, allowing users to quickly create and customize dashboards with its intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. It also offers a simple query language called Grafana Query Language (GQL) for data manipulation. Tableau, on the other hand, provides a more feature-rich interface with a steeper learning curve. It offers a wide range of features and capabilities, making it suitable for complex data analysis and advanced data visualization.
Visualization Options: Grafana provides a rich set of visualization options, primarily focused on time series data with features such as graphs, gauges, and heat maps. It also allows users to create alerts and notifications based on data thresholds. Tableau, on the other hand, offers a diverse range of visualizations including charts, maps, scatter plots, and more. It also provides advanced analytics features such as forecasting, clustering, and trend analysis.
Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a strong open-source community and a wide ecosystem of plugins and extensions, allowing users to extend its capabilities and integrate with various data sources and services. Tableau also has a thriving community but is more focused on its commercial offering, with a dedicated marketplace for pre-built dashboards, data connectors, and extensions.
Cost and Licensing: Grafana is open-source software available under the Apache License 2.0, which means it is free to use and modify. However, additional costs may arise if using premium data sources or enterprise-level support. Tableau, on the other hand, is a commercial product with different licensing options, including a desktop version for individual users and enterprise-level subscriptions that provide additional features and support. This makes Tableau more costly, especially for organizations requiring a large number of licenses.
Customization and SDKs: Grafana offers extensive customization options through its plugins and a rich set of APIs, allowing users to modify and extend its functionality. It also offers software development kits (SDKs) for building custom data sources and visualizations. Tableau also provides customization options through its JavaScript API but has more limited extensibility compared to Grafana.

In summary, Grafana is well-suited for real-time monitoring and observability use cases with its wide range of data source compatibility and user-friendly interface, while Tableau is more focused on traditional business intelligence and analytics, offering advanced analytics capabilities, a variety of visualization options, and a larger ecosystem of pre-built dashboards and connectors. The choice between the two depends on the specific needs and requirements of the organization or individual users.

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Advice on Tableau, Grafana

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.

868k views868k

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

Tableau	Grafana
Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.	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.
Connect to data on prem or in the cloud—whether it’s big data, a SQL database, a spreadsheet, or cloud apps like Google Analytics and Salesforce. Access and combine disparate data without writing code. Power users can pivot, split, and manage metadata to optimize data sources. Analysis begins with data. Get more from yours with Tableau.; Exceptional analytics demand more than a pretty dashboard. Quickly build powerful calculations from existing data, drag and drop reference lines and forecasts, and review statistical summaries. Make your point with trend analyses, regressions, and correlations for tried and true statistical understanding. Ask new questions, spot trends, identify opportunities, and make data-driven decisions with confidence.; Answer the “where” as well as the “why.” Create interactive maps automatically. Built-in postal codes mean lightning-fast mapping for more than 50 countries worldwide. Use custom geocodes and territories for personalized regions, like sales areas. We designed Tableau maps specifically to help your data stand out.; Ditch the static slides for live stories that others can explore. Create a compelling narrative that empowers everyone you work with to ask their own questions, analyzing interactive visualizations with fresh data. Be part of a culture of data collaboration, extending the impact of your insights.	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 70.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 13.1K
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 18.4K
Followers 1.4K	Followers 14.6K
Votes 8	Votes 415
Pros & Cons
Pros 6 Capable of visualising billions of rows 1 Responsive 1 Intuitive and easy to learn Cons 3 Very expensive for small companies	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
No integrations available	Graphite InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to Tableau, Grafana?

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.