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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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
3.8
Organizations using Elastic Search reported improved efficiency, faster performance, cost savings, and enhanced data management, emphasizing positive outcomes.
Sentiment score
4.8
Grafana improves data visualization, enhances operations, reduces AWS costs by 15%, and improves mean time to detect by 25%.
We have not purchased any licensed products, and our use of Elastic Search is purely open-source, contributing positively to our ROI.
Software Engineer at Government of India
It is stable, and we do not encounter critical issues like server downtime, which could result in data loss.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The main benefits observed from using Elastic Search include improvements in operational efficiency, along with cost, time, and resource savings.
Senior Devops Engineer at Ubique Digital LTD
I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.3
Elastic Search customer service is praised for responsiveness and expertise, though some users note occasional slow responses.
Sentiment score
7.1
Grafana's efficient customer service and strong open-source community provide valuable support and resources for technical issues.
For P1 tickets, they provide very immediate quick responses and join calls to support and troubleshoot the issue accordingly.
Elastic Engineer at The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)
The customer support for Elastic Search is one of the best I have ever tried.
Software Developer at a media company with 10,001+ employees
They have always been really responsible and responsive to my requests.
Security Lead at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
The technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Elastic Search is scalable and reliable for high-volume tasks, though some users face challenges with cost and complex data handling.
Sentiment score
6.0
Grafana provides scalable solutions for visualization, though complexity and costs vary with deployment size and infrastructure needs.
We can search through that document quite easily, sometimes in 7 milliseconds, sometimes one or two milliseconds.
Product Engineer at A3L
Performance tests involving one million requests at once, we encountered issues with shards and nodes not upscaling as needed, leading to crashes and minimal data loss.
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I would rate its scalability a ten.
Backend Developer
It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Search is reliable, especially under one terabyte, with occasional issues and challenges from frequent updates.
Sentiment score
7.9
Grafana is stable and reliable with minor issues; performance varies based on resource configuration and architectural factors.
The data transfer sometimes exceeded the bandwidth limits without proper notification, which caused issues.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The stability of Elasticsearch was very high.
Backend Developer
When you put one keyword, everything related to that keyword in your ecosystem will showcase all the results.
Chief Information Security Officer at CDSL Ventures Limited
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Even when handling millions of data points, the visualization layer remains responsive.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users criticize Elastic Search for mapping conflicts, complex setup, high costs, and desire improved AI integration and better documentation.
Grafana users seek enhanced dashboard usability, AI features, integration ease, user interface, flexible licensing, and better security and compatibility.
From a technical point of view, there are no significant issues recalled as Elastic Search has been absolutely awesome for this use case and covers 100% of the needs.
Principal Scientific Computing Software Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
If I need to parse one million records saved into Elastic Search, it becomes a nightmare because I need to do the pagination, and it is very problematic in that regard.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Observability features like search latency, indexing rate, and maybe rejected requests should be added to make the platform more reliable and accessible for everyone.
Senior System Engineer at EPAM Systems
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
AWS Cloud Re-Start Program Specialist at Orange RDC (Congo)
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
BI and Analytics Engineer at Sandvine Inc
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
Director of Engineering at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Search offers enterprise pricing based on nodes, with costs varying by features, support, and deployment options.
Grafana provides flexible pricing, from a free version to paid tiers, appealing to varied enterprise needs and scalable deployments.
On the AWS side, it is very expensive because they charge based on query basis or how much data is transferred in and out, making it very expensive.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Having the hosted solution and not having to pay for essentially a DevOps person on staff to manage makes it affordable.
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
I purchased my Grafana Cloud subscription through the AWS Marketplace, which simplified my procurement process and allowed me to apply the cost towards my AWS committed spend.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Search enhances data handling with advanced search features, scalability, AI integrations, and powerful visualization via Kibana.
Grafana is praised for its customizable dashboards, integration, real-time monitoring, open-source nature, and broad community support.
Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations.
Software Engineer at Government of India
The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch was the quick search capability, allowing us to search by any criteria needed.
Backend Developer
The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis.
Director, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
You can check those metrics in the incident management tool by filtering the alert source as Grafana, and it helps in reducing production incidents because you can acknowledge and visualize the metrics from Grafana on time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Search
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st), Vector Databases (2nd)
Grafana
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
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 10.9%, down 24.9% compared to last year.
Grafana, on the other hand, focuses on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability, holds 2.7% mindshare, down 6.8% since last year.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search10.9%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.3%
Lucidworks5.9%
Other76.9%
Indexing and Search
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana2.7%
Dynatrace5.5%
Datadog4.7%
Other87.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Unified dashboards have empowered teams and have democratized real-time operational insights
Grafana's snapshot and dashboard sharing features are critical for our remote incident response. During production issues, I generate a public snapshot of a dashboard at a specific point and share the URL in our Slack war room so every engineer can see exactly what the metrics looked like when the error occurred. This helps significantly during the process of finding the root cause in those scenarios. The best features Grafana offers go beyond just pretty charts; it is an integration engine. The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere. My team uses this feature by comparing two different tables from the databases to show one single view, which Grafana is really helping with. In a visualized way, the charts can be displayed on one dashboard, allowing end users who are not familiar with these technical aspects to extract valuable data from it. Grafana has positively impacted our organization by democratizing data within our company. Before using Grafana, only developers could see the system health, but now our product managers and executives have their own high-level dashboards, which has improved cross-departmental transparency and alignment.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
When it comes to pricing, I think we had to pay AWS approximately 1,000 to 1,200 per month for the overall stack. I am not quite certain about how much Elastic Search costs specifically because I w...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search has many features, including Kibana and Logstash, which we regularly use. However, one downside in our product is cost, as it can be expensive when maintaining multiple shards and in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
As a developer, I use Elastic Search in developing one of my applications, basically integrating the back-end with Elastic Search. Our main use case for Elastic Search is for Logstash, which is a s...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very reasonable and has excellent community support.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Currently, I do not think that any improvement is required, but there are multiple use cases.
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
My main use case for Grafana is to create and design dashboards based on the metrics provided by different exporters via Prometheus. We have different exporters, and we are creating different dashb...
 

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, Glean, Luigi's Box and others in Indexing and Search. Updated: May 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.