Grafana vs. Prometheus

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.6 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
Prometheus
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Prometheus is a service monitoring and time series database, which is open source.N/A
Pricing
GrafanaPrometheus
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaPrometheus
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaPrometheus
Considered Both Products
Grafana
Chose Grafana
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.
Prometheus
Chose Prometheus
We evaluated Datadog and New Relic but cost-wise, these 2 are very expensive. Prometheus does require more leg work to match the feature sets but other than time, the cost is free. Pairing with Grafana, Prometheus can pretty much match features with the big players and still …
Chose Prometheus
The software is very lightweight and can be hosted with minimal resource usage. Many exporters exist for various software. Prometheus has a powerful and flexible query language (PromQL) that allows analyzing your data easy. I use this software with its various exporters, …
Chose Prometheus
We used Grafana and Prometheus to take advantage of both tools' features (ex. alerting, and visualization with Grafana).
Chose Prometheus
We considered TICK stack as an alternative to our Prometheus/Grafana setup that we have for capturing, storing and visualizing the time series data.
But it seemed more complicated to learn and required a separate DB called InfluxDB to be setup.
So, after all these considerations, …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus is great for quantifiable metrics. Loki is intended for log aggregation. Depending on project a different combination of data source types may be needed. However, quantifiable metrics are predominantly supported by Prometheus. Other data sources like elastic search …
Chose Prometheus
Prometheus is similar to some of its competitors but delivers with regards to metrics; being used internally by Google and other cloud-native companies like ours gives us the confidence that the alerting industry stakeholders view it as a long-term solution that the community …
Features
GrafanaPrometheus
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.2
7 Ratings
2% above category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports7.87 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.67 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.37 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.9
6 Ratings
1% above category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis7.86 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages7.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
6 Ratings
3% above category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Publish to Web8.16 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning8.36 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.6
6 Ratings
10% above category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.24 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaPrometheus
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.8 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.8 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 7.2 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaPrometheus
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(7 ratings)
7.7
(35 ratings)
Usability
9.6
(3 ratings)
6.7
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaPrometheus
Likelihood to Recommend
Grafana Labs
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
Read full review
Open Source
This program works from the roots of the problem and creates a professional matrix for each of its users. This will give them more skills and resources to carry out tasks and reduce the difficulties of operating each of the processes of my work, as well as being An ally for the manipulation and operability of all your master data; Prometheus is very easy to recommend since it is a program that fulfills its mission.
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
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Open Source
  • Looking at metrics such as the aggregate number of HTTP requests served.
  • Understanding how our services are performing in aggregate.
  • Easy to deploy within a variety of architectures/environments.
  • Open source so new features are added regularly and bugs are fixed in a timely manner.
  • Free so there are no licensing restrictions.
  • Endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
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
Open Source
  • Customer Service: since this is an open-source tool, customer service is not that great. Generally, you get all answers to your problems in online forums, but in case you got stuck, nobody will assist you in a channelised manner. You will have to find the way out on your own, and it may become frustrating at times.
  • More metrics for dashboards shall be added per the application being monitored. Standards metrics will work in most cases but may not in specific applications. Therefore, customised metrics shall be created for some of the industry-standard niche applications.
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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
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Open Source
It is usable and one can learn if few people in the team are already using it. It can be difficult to understand at the beginning because of non intuitive UI and syntax of the rules. So, I've gone for 7 points as there is some room for improvement in user interface and rules syntax.
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Support Rating
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Open Source
Never had to reach out to them.
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
Open Source
Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with Grafana. It also has a sophisticated alert setting mechanism to ensure we don't miss anything critical.
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Return on Investment
Grafana Labs
  • Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
  • The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
  • Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer
Read full review
Open Source
  • We are still working on the ROI
  • The ROI mentioned during the purchase has not been achieved, however this could be due to lack of data from our side. 2 years of implementation is too early to calculate and confirm the ROI.
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ScreenShots