| 1 | Cross-platform tool | When we say about the Grafana its a cross-paltform tool and this will provides integration with various platforms and databases. | When we say about the Kibana it is not a cross-platform tool and this is specifically designed for ELK stack and here k in "ELK" is for Kibana. |
| 2 | Datasource Support | Grafana support multiple datasource and these are AWS Cloudwatch, Azure Monitor, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Graphite, InfluxDB, Loki, MySQL, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Jaeger and Tempo. | Currently Kibana only supports Elasticsearch as a data source. |
| 3 | Best for | Grafana is better suited for applications that require continuous real-time monitoring metrics like CPU load, memory, etc. | Kibana is better suited for log file analysis and full-text search queries. |
| 4 | Base definition | When we say about the Grafana it is an open-source standalone log analyzing and monitoring tool. | When we say about the Kibana it is a part of the ELK stack used for data analysis and log monitoring. |
| 5 | Alert and logs | When we say about the Grafana it gives custom real-time alerts as the data comes and it identifies patterns in the data and sends alerts. | Kibana is quite powerful with the log analysis. Kibana supports alerts but only with the help of plugins. Kibana supports APIs called data watchers, which basically does the same thing as sending alerts. |
| 6 | Query Editor | When we say about the query editors Grafana provides a multiple query editor based on the database and its query syntax. | Kibana supports syntax Lucene, Elasticsearch’s DSL and query (This is supported from kibana 6.3 onwards.) |
| 7 | Config files | When we say about the Grafana its a environment variables for Grafana are configured via .ini file. | Kibana has YAML files to store all the configuration details for set up and running. |
| 8 | Setup | Setting up Grafana is very easy as it is standalone. | Kibana should be configured against the same version of the elastic node. |
| 9 | Famous Company | Most of the companies use Grafana: 9gag, Digitalocean, postmates, etc. | Most companies use Kibana: trivago, bitbucket, Hubspot, etc.Conclusion |
| 10 | License | Grafana is open-source is under Apache 2.0 | When we say about the license it bases on Elastic License and Server Side Public License (SSPL) |
| 11 | Parent Company | Grafana parent company is Grafana Labs. | Here parent company of Kibana is Elastic |