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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

"The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch is its convenience in handling unstructured data."
"The most valuable features are the ease and speed of the setup."
"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 solution has great scalability."
"ELK Elasticsearch is 100% scalable as scalability is built into the design"
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"It provides a graphical representation and it's clear to see what's happening."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"Great capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
 

Cons

"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
"It should be easier to use. It has been getting better because many functions are pre-defined, but it still needs improvement."
"Elastic Search could benefit from a more user-friendly onboarding process for beginners."
"Ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"Elastic Search should provide better guides for developers."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
"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."
"All the features are complicated."
"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve."
"Grafana could consider building its own metrics system to eliminate the reliance on other tools like Prometheus, providing a one-stop solution."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"The formatting could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"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."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"We are using the free version and intend to upgrade."
"The premium license is expensive."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
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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.
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