Grafana vs. Metabase

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Metabase
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Metabase aims to bring data tools with the simplicity of consumer products to the crufty world of enterprise business intelligence. Their open source analytics and business intelligence applications connect to most commonly used databases to let anyone in a company ask questions, and create dashboards or nightly emails without knowing SQL. Metabase Enterprise enables the user to embed branded analytics into customer applications.
$85
per month
Pricing
GrafanaMetabase
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Starter
$85
per month (includes 5 users, then $5 per user, per month)
Growth
$749
per month (includes 10 users, then $15 per user, per month)
Open Source
Free
Enterprise
starting at $15,000
per year
Enterprise
Starts at $15,000
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaMetabase
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
GrafanaMetabase
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
5 Ratings
4% below category average
Metabase
7.8
4 Ratings
4% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports6.35 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.05 Ratings8.54 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.75 Ratings6.94 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.2
4 Ratings
10% below category average
Metabase
7.5
4 Ratings
7% below category average
Drill-down analysis6.64 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.04 Ratings7.14 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.94 Ratings5.62 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.34 Ratings9.14 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.6
4 Ratings
3% above category average
Metabase
8.6
2 Ratings
4% above category average
Publish to Web7.64 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.04 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Report Versioning9.04 Ratings7.62 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.34 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.34 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.7
4 Ratings
4% below category average
Metabase
7.9
4 Ratings
0% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.44 Ratings8.64 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.74 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.04 Ratings7.02 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.62 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Metabase
9.6
4 Ratings
12% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings8.94 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings9.64 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings9.63 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Metabase
9.0
2 Ratings
13% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Metabase
8.7
3 Ratings
12% above category average
REST API00 Ratings8.23 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings9.02 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings7.02 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaMetabase
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.5 out of 10
Yellowfin
Yellowfin
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.5 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 8.4 out of 10
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaMetabase
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(5 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaMetabase
Likelihood to Recommend
Grafana Labs
If I was starting over on an Observability platform, Grafana would be my number 1 choice due to the flexibility and ability to act as a single platform either on its own or combining multiple data sources. The trick however, is that it can be fairly complex to learn and setup, so time is needed to make it a successful implementation. There is a level of cognitive load required
Read full review
Metabase
Metabase is an easy tool to use if you are interested in collecting and aggregating data from multiple platforms. It is also easy to set up and start receiving the data results as a report. It is also easy to integrate with other tools that generate visual reports and take the necessary actions based on the data details.
Read full review
Pros
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
Metabase
  • We're currently using it to fetch reports for our products, such as daily sales, pipeline, visits, and attendance reports.
  • Data representation from database directly.
Read full review
Cons
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Read full review
Metabase
  • Report Types
  • Updates
  • Colour/Branding
Read full review
Usability
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
Read full review
Metabase
Its generally quite easy to use but some SQL is definitely important
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Read full review
Metabase
It does not stack up against Metabase, they complete each other.
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Return on Investment
Grafana Labs
  • Time-consuming reports reduced
  • Spotting trends in services
  • Preventive maintenance
Read full review
Metabase
  • It is serving us whatever we're looking for, and we've recommended many organizations to implement it if they want better data analytics as it provides better functionality than we will build.
  • As a negative it gets difficult to get control over data to be fetch initially.
Read full review
ScreenShots