Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Kibana

19.6K
15.5K
+ 1
261
Splunk

739
957
+ 1
14
Add tool

Kibana vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Kibana: Explore & Visualize Your Data. 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; Splunk: Search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data. Splunk Inc. provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use Splunk to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

Kibana belongs to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack, while Splunk can be primarily classified under "Log Management".

Kibana is an open source tool with 12.4K GitHub stars and 4.81K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kibana's open source repository on GitHub.

Airbnb, DigitalOcean, and 9GAG are some of the popular companies that use Kibana, whereas Splunk is used by Starbucks, Intuit, and Razorpay. Kibana has a broader approval, being mentioned in 908 company stacks & 481 developers stacks; compared to Splunk, which is listed in 31 company stacks and 29 developer stacks.

Advice on Kibana and Splunk
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."

See more
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)
See more
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

See more
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 .

See more
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.

See more
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).

See more
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

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

See more
Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 552.6K 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.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Kibana
Pros of Splunk
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 64
    Free
  • 45
    Can search text
  • 21
    Has pie chart
  • 13
    X-axis is not restricted to timestamp
  • 9
    Easy queries and is a good way to view logs
  • 6
    Supports Plugins
  • 4
    Dev Tools
  • 3
    Can build dashboards
  • 3
    More "user-friendly"
  • 2
    Out-of-Box Dashboards/Analytics for Metrics/Heartbeat
  • 2
    Easy to drill-down
  • 1
    Up and running
  • 2
    Ability to style search results into reports
  • 2
    Alert system based on custom query results
  • 2
    API for searching logs, running reports
  • 2
    Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc
  • 1
    Query any log as key-value pairs
  • 1
    Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc
  • 1
    Granular scheduling and time window support
  • 1
    Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing
  • 1
    Dashboarding on any log contents
  • 1
    Rich GUI for searching live logs

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Kibana
Cons of Splunk
  • 6
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
  • 3
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 1
    Splunk query language rich so lots to learn

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

- No public GitHub repository available -

What is 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.

What is Splunk?

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Kibana?
What companies use Splunk?
See which teams inside your own company are using Kibana or Splunk.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Kibana?
What tools integrate with Splunk?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

Blue Medora

DockerPostgreSQLNew Relic+8
11
2255
May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

Elastic

ElasticsearchKibanaLogstash+4
12
4944
Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

Twilio SendGrid

GitHubDockerKafka+10
11
9843
GitHubPythonReact+42
49
40493
GitHubGitPython+22
17
14128
GitHubMySQLSlack+44
109
50572
What are some alternatives to Kibana and Splunk?
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!
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.
Loggly
It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.
Graylog
Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.
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.
See all alternatives