Grafana vs. Prometheus

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
Prometheus
Score 8.4 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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
GrafanaPrometheus
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
5 Ratings
4% below category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports6.45 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.65 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.3
4 Ratings
9% below category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis6.74 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages6.14 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.44 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.7
4 Ratings
5% above category average
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Publish to Web7.74 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning9.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.44 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.44 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
Prometheus
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.34 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.64 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.72 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaPrometheus
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.4 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mathematica
Mathematica
Score 8.2 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 8.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaPrometheus
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(5 ratings)
7.5
(35 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
6.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaPrometheus
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
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
Read full review
Open Source
  • Best monitoring tool that have covered all aspects of our environment of my organization with it's useful metrics.
  • Great support team offers support 24/7 and very dedicated.
  • It provides excellent insights from a variety of metrics.
  • Cloud native tools compatibility and support, push/pull options for easier metrics.
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
  • Not a good choice if you need very high levels of accuracy with regards to collecting 100% of a certain type of data.
  • The user interface does not have much eye candy which helps you focus on what you need to see but can appear very basic in its design sometimes.
  • PromQL does have a high learning curve.
  • Not great for high cardinality data types.
  • Unlike other platforms, Prometheus does not have a macro system.
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
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
  • Time-consuming reports reduced
  • Spotting trends in services
  • Preventive maintenance
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