15 Best Grafana Alternatives in 2024

Grafana is a free open-source software for data visualization. It is a powerful and feature-rich tool for exploring, creating, and sharing dashboards with your colleagues. It allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Grafana provides support for over 30 data sources with tools specially crafted for each one. You can choose from a vast amount of visualization options such as graphs, tables, and heatmaps and combine them in creating dashboards.

✅ Pros:

• Grafana supports a vast amount of community templates and plugins that are ready to use and can improve your overall experience.
• Grafana provides support for over 30 data sources. other data sources can be added via plugins.
• Grafana offers highly customizable dashboards with custom alerts and notifications.
• Grafana has a rich built-in user authentication system and offers the creation of organizations.
• Grafana provides a rich set of additional features such as data annotations or snapshots.

❌ Cons:

• Grafana has poor support for log analysis as its main focus is on metrics analysis.
• Data collection and storage must be set up separately.

Top Grafana Alternatives in 2023

Data visualization helps you analyze data in human-processable way. Bellow, you will find a list of the best visualization and data analytics tools in 2023. If you are interested in data visualization, make sure to check out Harvard's article about data visualization techniques.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack offers a Log management solution with Grafana built-in for visualizations, Real-time Log tracking thanks to Live Tail features, and advanced alerting features. You can also integrate it with Better Uptime and obtain complete log management, monitoring, and Incident management platform. Thanks to its custom data pipelines and ClickHouse-based storage, Better Stack offers very competitive prices, starting at $0.25/GB, which is often more than 10 times less than Elastic stack-based solutions. Better Stack allows you to query your logs the same way you'd query your database with SQL-compatible structured log management. Using Better Stack, you can search petabytes of logs in a moment and set anomaly detection or custom presence/absence alerts to receive alerts when your logs become out of the ordinary.

One of the greatest benefits of Better Stack is built-in collaboration features, where you can cooperate with your colleagues in a google docs-like environment, save, share, and archive parts of code, and collaborate with your colleagues. By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, or AWS, and more, you get a broad array of options for monitoring.

Tighter security is one of the main benefits of log monitoring, and Better Stack itself is one of the most secure tools available. Using industry-standard best practices and cooperating only with data centers compliant with DIN ISO/IEC27001 certifications, your data is safe during both transit and storage.

Main Benefits of Better Stack:

• Inexpensive and extremely efficient ClickHouse based tool
• Integration with Better Stack Uptime, enabling even better observability
• Pricing starts at $0.25

2. OpenSearch Dashboards

OpenSearch Dashboards is the default visualization tool in OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a community-built, open-source search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch and Kibana. OpenSearch allows you to ingest, search, aggregate, view, and analyze data for uses such as log analysis.

OpenSearch Dashboards is a user interface for OpenSearch plugins such as security, alerts, SQL, and more.

Basically, OpenSearch Dashboards offers a forked version of Kibana 7.10.2, enhanced by a variety of community-sourced add-ons and plugins. The best advantages over Kibana are compliances with SOC 2, CMMC, and NIST.

Main Benefits of OpenSearch Dashboards

• A fork of Kibana
• Compliance

3. D3.js

D3.js is a JavaScript library allowing you to visualize data using HTML, SVG, and CSS. Thanks to its respect towards web standards it allows you to work with modern web browser frameworks and leverage DOM manipulation.

D3 is one of the fastest tools out there, supports large datasets. Thanks to its wide community, you can reuse it with a broad collection of official, and community-developed modules.

Main Benefits of D3.js

• Lightweight, JavaScript library
• Wide Community

4. Observable

Observable allows you to explore, analyze visualize data. Observable offers multiple means of visualization and a great platform for its community to develop custom templates. Observable was founded by the developers of D3.js in 2016 and leveraged their previous work and added much more.

Now, Observable allows you to create basically any visualization you want, depending on your coding skills and templates available. Observable has a huge community of contributors, creating their own data visualizations and their staff offers curated picks depending on what data they work with.

Main Benefits of Observable:

• Built by D3.js developers
• Community-sourced templates

5. Power BI

Power BI is a visualization and analysis platform allowing you to gain deeper data insight. It’s designed in a familiar, Microsoft Office-ish UI and logically, works best as a part of bundle alongside Azure and Office.

Power BI offers more than 500 free connections, allowing you to connect to data sources such as Dynamics 365, Azure SQL Database, Salesforce, Excel, or SharePoint.

It’s made to visualize and analyze data, but you can also use it to embed data in your applications.

Power BI starts with a PRO plan at $9.99/user/month and is a part of Microsoft 365 E5. Premium is priced either per-user or per capacity. Per-user pricing starts at $20, licenses at $4,995.

Main Benefits of Power BI:

• Part of the Microsoft Stack and works well with Office and Azure
• Data embedding

6. Kibana

Kibana is an integral part of the Elastic stack and it’s the frontend part of it. Often integrated into the ELK stack and its many mutations. ELK is an acronym for three open-source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch.

With Kibana, you can analyze vast amounts of data coming from Elasticsearch. You can choose from a rich selection of visualization options and combine those options to create dashboards that are accessible from anywhere

Kibana, ideally integrated with Elasticsearch allows you to search, view and visualize indexed data. It allows you to create charts, tables, histograms, and maps. Its Dashboards combines multiple visualization methods in order to provide you with a processable view of large volumes of data.

Kibana performs well when visualizing data from Log management, Infrastructure monitoring, APM, SIEM, or Business.

It also allows you to monitor and manage your Elastic Stack instance and offers centralized access for solutions developed on the Elastic Stack.

We've covered the Grafana vs. Kibana differences in our previous post.

Main Benefits of Kibana:

• Kibana doesn't require additional coding
• Custom visualization options
• Relation analysis
• built-in anomaly detection system.

7. Tableau

Tableau offers a powerful analytics and data visualization solution suitable for most uses ranging from data science to business. It allows you to discover trends using machine learning algorithms, statistics, natural language, and data prep.

Tableau is based on scientific research concerning how to make analysis more efficient. Tableau is flexible and scalable, offers enterprise-grade security, and offers an extensible platform.

Tableau offers VizQL, a visual query language for databases. It’s a translator of sorts, translating SQL queries and the returns in numbers and tables into a visual analysis. Each drag-and-drop action you perform, VizQL interprets as a query and then renders as Tableau visual.

Tableau is a Salesforce product and offers multiple pricing plans. It depends whether you are a group, an individual, or want to have Tableau embedded. Individual Plans start at around $70.

Main Benefits of Tableau:

• Science-based approach
• VizQL

8. QlikView

Qlik(click)View is a guided analytics solution allowing you to create interactive applications and dashboards. It allows you to integrate data from multiple sources and make it available via your network, making sure that the right information gets to the right person.

You navigate data by clicking, which helps you to process information in your own way. QlikView allows you to create a centralized overview of your data in multiple storages and databases - whether they are your own, or someone else’s and can be integrated with practically any database.

Qlikview allows you to create a flexible end-user interface to an information warehouse, get snapshots of data relations, make data-based presentations, create dynamic graphs, charts and tables, and much more. You can also use it to create your own, custom BI tool.

9. Knowi

Knowi offers native support to Elasticsearch, and also support for other (No)SQL and REST API sources. Instead of the usual ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Knowi virtualized data, which allows it to connect to any source in real-time and save resources.

Knowi also allows you to work with unstructured data. Since its funding in 2015, Knowi became one of the most powerful BI tools available. Knowi supports more than 30 visualizations and allows you to create your own, using JavaScript.

Knowi offers custom annual pricing plans, to obtain it, you need to contact their sales team.

Main Benefits of Knowi:

• Custom data visualization options
• Native Elastisearch support
• Custom pricing plans

10. Datawrapper

Datawrapper allows you to visualize data in Charts, Maps, and Tables. You can pick from 19 interactive and responsive chart types ranging from bars to scatter plots. There are three different maps available allowing you to display geospatial data in a logical manner and a plethora of Responsive data tables allowing you to create bar, column, and line charts or heatmaps.

Datawrapper requires no previous coding skills, all you need to do is paste data in a structured format and use their UI to customize your final visual.

Datawrapper offers unlimited visualizations, collaboration features, print-ready formats, multiple export formats, and support for mobile devices.

Main Benefits of Datawrapper:

• Generous Free Plan
• No coding needed

11. Knime

Knime allows you to analyze and visualize thanks to a modern approach to analytics by combining machine learning and artificial intelligence-based approaches with classic statistical analysis and data mining methods. By combining all of that, alongside R and Python integrations, Knime offers a powerful, open-source analytics platform.

Knime makes sure that your data is explainable in every step and state, meaning that you will always understand where it came from and how it was processed. This allows you to get consistent results over time.

Main Benefits of Knime:

• Integration with a lot of other open-source platforms
• Self-paced onboarding courses

12. Redash

Redash is a popular Open Source project allowing you to connect and query data sources and visualize them in dashboards. Redash offers Drag & Drop, easy to navigate, and resizable visualizations that allow you to schedule refresh from your data sources and share your dashboards with your teammates, or stakeholders.

Redash has a lot of useful features such as queries in natural syntax, live auto-complete and keyboard shortcuts, custom snippets for elements you use frequently. Also, cache management, and more. Redash offers integrations with the most popular databases and platforms.

Main Benefits of Redash:

• Popular, open-source project
• Wide-variety of features and integrations

13. Charted

Charted is a visualization tool made by the Product Science team at Medium. All you need to do is provide a link to a data file and Charted will return an interactive, and shareable chart based on the data.

Charted is not as great when it comes to formatting and data transformation, but allows you to re-fetch the data and update your chart every 30 minutes, move data series into separate charts and modify chart type, labels, and background.

Charted supports files in .csv, .tsv, Google Spreadsheets and Dropbox.

Main Benefits of Charted:

• It is an open-source tool available from Github

14. Dygraphs

Dygraphs is an open-source JavaScript library for charting, allowing you to explore and visualize data using a simple set of commands.

It allows you to handle huge data sets and plots millions of points easily. Offers out-of-the-box interactivity, meaning that you can zoom, pan, and mouseover your charts by default. Since it’s a library, it offers almost no restrictions, which makes it a highly customizable tool. Dygraphs are supported by all recent browsers and even support touchscreen functions such as pinch to zoom.

Main Benefits of Dygraphs:

• A broad community of developers still develop and support this library
• Customizability

15. Chart.js

Chart.js is a JavaScript based tool available under MIT License allowing you to create simple, but well designed, customizable charts with a few lines of code.

You can animate your charts and pick from multiple different types, including Area, Bar, Bubble, Doughnut and Pie, Line, Polar and more different types of charts. Charts can be organized in different axes.

Main Benefits of Chart.js:

• available to instal using npm or Github
• Active development community

Conclusion

In this article, we took a closer look at Data Visualization and especially Grafana. We overviewed its features, strengths, and weaknesses. It’s worth mentioning that software, transforming data to a human-processable format is essential for the success of any data-driven operation. Some of the tools we proposed are purely for visualization, others serve as Analytics platforms and others offer complete BI and data science solutions. Hopefully, you should find at least one, which will fit into your stack perfectly.

Other useful resources to explore:

• Grafana vs Kibana
• Nagios vs Zabbix vs Prometheus
• Datadog alternatives
• New Relic alternatives