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Kibana vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Introduction

Kibana and Splunk are powerful data analysis and visualization tools used in the field of big data. Both tools provide various features to help organizations gain insights from their data. However, there are key differences between Kibana and Splunk that make them suitable for different use cases. Let's explore these differences below:

  1. Data Source Compatibility: Kibana primarily integrates with Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine, allowing users to leverage the full power of Elasticsearch for data storage and querying. On the other hand, Splunk has its proprietary data store and can directly ingest data from a wide range of sources, providing more flexibility in terms of data source compatibility.

  2. Licensing Model: Kibana is an open-source tool licensed by Apache 2.0, which means it can be freely used and modified by the users. Splunk, however, follows a commercial licensing model where users need to purchase licenses based on their data volume and usage. This difference in licensing can have cost implications for organizations considering these tools.

  3. Ease of Use: While both Kibana and Splunk offer user-friendly interfaces, Kibana leans more towards simplicity and ease of use. It provides a clean and intuitive interface, making it easier for beginners to get started with data exploration and visualization. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a more comprehensive and feature-rich interface suitable for advanced users and those requiring complex data analysis capabilities.

  4. Customization and Extensibility: Kibana provides a wide range of customization options, allowing users to create dashboards, visualizations, and custom plugins tailored to their specific requirements. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a robust platform with a vast library of pre-built apps and integrations, making it easier to extend the functionality of the tool without much technical expertise.

  5. Community Support: Kibana benefits from a large and active open-source community, which contributes to its development and provides support through forums, online resources, and community-driven plugins. Splunk, being a proprietary tool, has a smaller community but provides official support channels with access to enterprise-level support resources.

  6. Scalability and Performance: Kibana performs exceptionally well when used with Elasticsearch clusters, which enable horizontal scalability and the ability to handle large volumes of data. Splunk, on the other hand, is generally considered to be a more scalable solution out of the box and can handle high ingestion rates and complex data analysis requirements without the need for additional cluster setup.

In Summary, Kibana and Splunk differ in terms of data source compatibility, licensing, ease of use, customization and extensibility options, community support, and scalability. Choosing between the two would depend on specific requirements, preferences, and resources of the organization.

Advice on Kibana and Splunk
Needs advice
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GrafanaGrafana
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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
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GrafanaGrafana
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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 · 620.7K views
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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 Kibana
Pros of Splunk
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 65
    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
    More "user-friendly"
  • 3
    Can build dashboards
  • 2
    Out-of-Box Dashboards/Analytics for Metrics/Heartbeat
  • 2
    Easy to drill-down
  • 1
    Up and running
  • 3
    API for searching logs, running reports
  • 3
    Alert system based on custom query results
  • 2
    Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc
  • 2
    Dashboarding on any log contents
  • 2
    Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing
  • 2
    Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc
  • 2
    Rich GUI for searching live logs
  • 2
    Ability to style search results into reports
  • 1
    Granular scheduling and time window support
  • 1
    Query any log as key-value pairs

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Cons of Kibana
Cons of Splunk
  • 7
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
  • 1
    Splunk query language rich so lots to learn

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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.

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