Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Zabbix VS Grafana

Compare Zabbix VS Grafana and see what are their differences

Zabbix logo Zabbix

Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases
  • Zabbix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-10-02
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Grafana

$ Details
Release Date
2014 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
New York
City
New York
Founder(s)
Anthony Woods
Employees
100 - 249

Zabbix features and specs

  • Open-source
    Zabbix is free and open-source, allowing for extensive customization and modification to meet specific needs without licensing costs.
  • Scalability
    Zabbix can handle a large number of devices and data points, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Zabbix offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including servers, networks, cloud services, and applications.
  • Alerting and Notification
    It provides robust alerting mechanisms, allowing notifications via email, SMS, and other methods.
  • Flexible Configuration
    The system allows for detailed and flexible configuration, accommodating various specific monitoring requirements.
  • Extensive API
    Zabbix comes with a comprehensive API that allows for integration with third-party tools and custom automation scripts.
  • Strong Community Support
    As an open-source project, Zabbix has a strong community that can provide support and share best practices.

Possible disadvantages of Zabbix

  • Complex Setup and Configuration
    Initial setup and configuration can be complicated and time-consuming, often requiring a steep learning curve.
  • Resource Intensive
    Zabbix can be resource-intensive, particularly on the database side, which might require substantial hardware resources for large deployments.
  • User Interface
    The user interface is considered less modern and user-friendly compared to some commercial alternatives.
  • Documentation
    While comprehensive, the documentation can sometimes be difficult to navigate for new users.
  • Maintenance Effort
    Ongoing maintenance, such as updates and troubleshooting, can be labor-intensive.
  • Dependency on MySQL
    The heavy reliance on MySQL databases can be a disadvantage for users preferring other database technologies.
  • Initial Costs for Large Scale Deployments
    Although the software is free, the costs associated with setting up and maintaining the necessary infrastructure and hardware can be significant, especially for larger deployments.

Grafana features and specs

  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages of Grafana

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.

Zabbix videos

An overview of Zabbix 4.0 and how we are using it.

More videos:

  • Review - Zabbix Monitoring Solution - Overview
  • Review - ZABBIX Network Discovery For Dynamic Deployments

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

  • Review - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • Review - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Zabbix and Grafana)
Monitoring Tools
65 65%
35% 35
Log Management
70 70%
30% 30
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100
Performance Monitoring
77 77%
23% 23

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Zabbix and Grafana

Zabbix Reviews

  1. Stan
    · Founder at SaaSHub ·
    Indispensable

    Zabbix has been part of my toolbox for quite some time. I can easily say it's an indispensable tool for me now.

    Managing a dozen servers without Zabbix would be unimaginable. I'm monitoring all of this: CPU, Memory, Hard-drives, website response times, downtime. The UI might be a bit "old school", but everything works flawlessly.

    With regards to hard-drive monitoring, I love the machine learning option that allows you to "predict" the number of days before running out of space. That's quite helpful, as I've got some of my servers down due to running out of space multiple times in the past (before I was using Zabbix).

    👍 Pros:    Open-source|It can monitor everything
    👎 Cons:    The ui is a bit unintuitive in some cases

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Unlimited scaling: Zabbix is a flexible software that lets you monitor anything you want. It is highly scalable as it helps you manage both multi-tenant enterprise environments and your home.
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Zabbix is a very strong competitor to Nagios and its development is very encouraging. Zabbix is completely free to use, which makes it a competitor to Nagios Core. Zabbix beats Nagios in the free monitoring market because it has a good frontend, which Nagios Core lacks and it also provides NetFlow monitoring, which isn’t present in Nagios Core – that is a separate paid...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
Zabbix, a widely adopted open-source monitoring tool, offers a range of practical features. It allows you to monitor various aspects of your system, including transactions, application performance, and real browser monitoring. With ready-to-use templates for different servers and operating systems, Zabbix simplifies the monitoring process.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Zabbix offers a unified view of the entire IT infrastructure through its user-friendly web-based interface. It delivers potent visualization capabilities through customizable dashboards, complemented by robust alerting mechanisms and comprehensive support for alert escalations.
Source: signoz.io

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though it’s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since you’ve landed yourself here, I’m guessing that you’re one of those people. Fear not! We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafana’s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be a lot more popular than Zabbix. While we know about 237 links to Grafana, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Zabbix. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Zabbix mentions (5)

  • Learning Resources
    Official Zabbix trainings, documentation on zabbix.com ? Source: over 2 years ago
  • zabbix installation
    Hallo, do you know a howto to install zabbix on an ubuntu 20.04 ? I tried the manuals from zabbix.com for MySQL Apache but it didn't work. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How I am getting experience as a linux admistrator (Follow Up)
    He suggested that I indeed should set up a home-lab. To be specific he said that I should create a minimal install of Centos 8 and install zabbix server on it (https://zabbix.com) and monitor a whole bunch of other VMs, services and stuff.. He said that I should set up a variety of VMs and also maybe host a website on one of them. And then if I was able to do that, I could help to share a load of zabbix related... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Ubuntu Impish 21.10 / Zabbix 6.0 LTS
    This is a fresh 21.10 install, using the install repo as detailed on the zabbix.com download page. Source: about 3 years ago
  • One dev conference speaker's family member died, need your help to fill the speaking slot on Nov 27/28
    Well, if you can't find anyone, I am more than happy to fill the slot with something regarding Zabbix - just let me know ;). Source: over 3 years ago

Grafana mentions (237)

View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Zabbix and Grafana, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Microsoft System Center - Microsoft System Center provides solutions to simplify the deployment, configuration, management, and monitoring of the infrastructure.