Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Elastic Search vs Grafana comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Search
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (2nd)
Grafana
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Elastic Search and Grafana aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Elastic Search is designed for Indexing and Search and holds a mindshare of 25.4%, down 26.6% compared to last year.
Grafana, on the other hand, focuses on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability, holds 6.4% mindshare, up 5.8% since last year.
Indexing and Search
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Captures data from all other sources and becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact. Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.
Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a stable and good platform."
"Search is really powerful."
"It helps us to analyse the logs based on the location, user, and other log parameters."
"Elastic Enterprise Search is scalable. On a scale of one to 10, with one being not scalable and 10 being very scalable, I give Elastic Enterprise Search a 10."
"Gives us a more user-friendly, centralized solution (for those who just needed a quick glance, without being masters of sed and awk) as well as the ability to implement various mechanisms for machine-learning from our logs, and sending alerts for anomalies."
"The most valuable features are the data store and the X-pack extension."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is user behavior analysis."
"The tool's stability and performance are good."
"It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."
"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"It's easy to make changes. We can put many dashboards in one place. There's no delay in showing data - what you see on Grafana matches the server metrics."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards."
 

Cons

"The real-time search functionality is not operational due to its impact on system resources."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"Elastic Enterprise Search's tech support is good but it could be improved."
"They're making changes in their architecture too frequently."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"Something that could be improved is better integrations with Cortex and QRadar, for example."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"Elasticsearch could be improved in terms of scalability."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"The product's configuration for saving files could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"The cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"The solution is free."
"I am using an open-source version"
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"We are using the open-source license."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"The solution is expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Indexing and Search solutions are best for your needs.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
I don't know about pricing. That is dealt with by the sales team and our account team. I was not involved with that.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good. There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if...
What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
I used the open-source version for my learning, which was free. In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs. I think predictive capabilities in ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic, Luigi's Box, OpenText and others in Indexing and Search. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.