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Grafana Labs Logo
11,905 views|8,069 comparisons
Prometheus Logo
6,014 views|5,334 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 29, 2023

We performed a comparison between Grafana and Prometheus based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Grafana's complexity and duration depend on the user and use case, while Prometheus has a straightforward setup but requires customization for more complex needs. Both products benefit from experience with the solution.
  • Features: Grafana has customizable graphs, is open source, and has good support. Prometheus is highly flexible, with APIs and libraries for integration, and has a reliable data storage system. Grafana excels in UI dashboards and live monitoring, while Prometheus has a valuable dashboard for collecting and comparing logs.
  • Pricing: Grafana has a variable setup cost depending on the number of metrics ingested per day, whereas Prometheus is free. Grafana has both open source and enterprise editions, while Prometheus is solely open source. Commercial use of Grafana requires a license, while Prometheus does not have any associated costs.
  • Service and Support: Grafana has efficient and responsive customer service, while Prometheus relies on documentation and community support. Users have positive experiences collaborating with Grafana's support team, while many Prometheus users do not need to contact technical support.
  • ROI: Grafana and Prometheus both offer good ROI for monitoring. Grafana stands out for its enriched data visualization while Prometheus has the added benefit of being a valuable free solution.

Comparison Results: Users prefer Grafana to Prometheus because it has better visualization tools, more customizable graphs, and a more user-friendly interface. Although Prometheus is known for its flexibility and integration capabilities, it lacks user-friendliness and reporting capabilities. Furthermore, Grafana provides better customer service and support, with a helpful community and good documentation. 

To learn more, read our detailed Grafana vs. Prometheus Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability.""The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud.""The dashboards are the most valuable features.""Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch.""Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools.""There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful.""The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data.""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."

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"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes.""The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics.""The most valuable features of Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring are its stability, robustness, and rich set of features.""The sky is the limit because the solution is a flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need to monitor applications.""I like its lightweight configuration functions.""The most valuable feature of Prometheus is the ease of pulling the metrics.""The solution offers an easy way to install and scratch values.""It has lots of APIs and libraries to integrate with any kind of language."

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Cons
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated.""The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk.""I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation.""I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients.""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.""There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations.""Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation.""Grafana need to improve the logging functionality."

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"If you are not quite technical, it can be pretty hard to understand the way it works and how to query data in Prometheus.""The simplicity of the query language could be improved. The current query language is not easy to work with.""The alert functionality is kind of lackluster.""There is a need for a more comprehensive overview of exporters, especially when dealing with many of them.""Its stability could be even better.""The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features to support custom use cases, like out-of-the-box test scenarios and threat-related use cases of its users.""The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience.""The query language in Prometheus is an area of concern where improvements are required."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "​Grafana is free and open source.​"
  • "I use the open source model so it is free."
  • "My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
  • "We use the open-source version of Grafana."
  • "We are using the open-source license."
  • "I give the price an eight out of ten."
  • "You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • More Grafana Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price of Prometheus is good, it is affordable because it is open source and there is no cost to it. You put it on your own server and the costs incurred completely depend on how you set it up."
  • "This is an open-source solution."
  • "The solution is not expensive."
  • "The solution is open source."
  • "The solution is free of cost."
  • "We use the solution's open-source version."
  • "The tool is open-sourced."
  • "We have the open-source version, so we don't pay for it."
  • More Prometheus Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
    Top Answer: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. I don't know if there are different paid versions of the product.
    Top Answer:I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation. There is a problem in the area of some graphs where you connect elements. With Grafana, there is only one name that can be included for ten… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring are its stability, robustness, and rich set of features.
    Top Answer:I use Prometheus to monitor my infrastructure and applications by setting up targets for scraping metrics, writing queries in PromQL to analyze the data, and configuring alerts to notify me of any… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    11,905
    Comparisons
    8,069
    Reviews
    36
    Average Words per Review
    387
    Rating
    7.9
    Views
    6,014
    Comparisons
    5,334
    Reviews
    24
    Average Words per Review
    379
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    New Relic logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Azure Monitor logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Sentry logo
    Compared 12% of the time.
    Dynatrace logo
    Compared 11% of the time.
    Honeycomb.io logo
    Compared 8% of the time.
    Azure Monitor logo
    Compared 25% of the time.
    New Relic logo
    Compared 17% of the time.
    Dynatrace logo
    Compared 15% of the time.
    Sentry logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    Learn More
    Grafana Labs
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    Overview

    Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that stands out in the field of monitoring solutions. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful, easy-to-set-up dashboards and visualizations. Grafana supports integration with a wide array of data sources and tools, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, Splunk, and Elasticsearch, enhancing its versatility. Grafana has open-source and cloud options; the open-source version is a good choice for organizations with the resources to manage their infrastructure and want more control over their deployment. The cloud service is a good choice if you want a fully managed solution that is easy to start with and scale.

    A key strength of Grafana lies in its ability to explore, visualize, query, and alert on the collected data through operational dashboards. These dashboards are highly customizable and visually appealing, making them a valuable asset for data analysis, performance tracking, trend spotting, and detecting irregularities.

    Grafana provides both an open-source solution with an active community and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed and composable observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The open-source version is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3), being free and unlimited. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are available for more advanced needs, catering to a wider range of organizational requirements. Grafana offers options for self-managed backend systems or fully managed services via Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud extends observability with a wide range of solutions for infrastructure monitoring, IRM, load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, continuous profiling, frontend observability, and more.

    The Grafana users we interviewed generally appreciate Grafana's ability to connect with various data sources, its straightforward usability, and its integration capabilities, especially in developer-oriented environments. The platform is noted for its practical alert configurations, ticketing backend integration, and as a powerful tool for developing dashboards. However, some users find a learning curve in the initial setup and mention the need for time investment to customize and leverage Grafana effectively. There are also calls for clearer documentation and simplification of notification alert templates.

    In summary, Grafana is a comprehensive solution for data visualization and monitoring, widely used across industries for its versatility, ease of use, and extensive integration options. It suits organizations seeking a customizable and scalable platform for visualizing time-series data from diverse sources. However, users should be prepared for some complexity in setup and customization and may need to invest time in learning and tailoring the system to their specific needs.

    Prometheus is a powerful open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for cloud-native environments. 

    It collects metrics from various sources, including applications, services, and infrastructure components, providing real-time insights into system performance. 

    With its flexible data model and query language, Prometheus enables users to analyze and visualize metrics, facilitating troubleshooting and capacity planning. Its robust alerting system allows for proactive monitoring, notifying users of any anomalies or issues. 

    Prometheus also offers seamless integration with popular tools and frameworks, making it a versatile solution for monitoring and observability.

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Retailer21%
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Comms Service Provider14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Retailer6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Retailer13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Educational Organization7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm28%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Government5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise28%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    Grafana vs. Prometheus
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Prometheus and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews while Prometheus is ranked 11th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 28 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while Prometheus is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prometheus writes "A very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need". Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and Honeycomb.io, whereas Prometheus is most compared with Azure Monitor, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sentry and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our Grafana vs. Prometheus report.

    See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.

    We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.