Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Grafana VS Highcharts

Compare Grafana VS Highcharts and see what are their differences

Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Highcharts logo Highcharts

A charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Highcharts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16

Grafana

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

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.

Highcharts features and specs

  • Customization
    Highcharts provides extensive options to customize chart appearance and functionality, allowing for a tailored and specific data visualization experience.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    Highcharts ensures compatibility across a wide range of browsers, making charts accessible to users regardless of their browser preferences.
  • Wide Range of Chart Types
    Offers a broad spectrum of chart types, including line, bar, pie, scatter, and more, catering to various data visualization needs.
  • Interactive Features
    Includes numerous interactive features such as tooltips, zooming, and clickable points, enhancing user engagement with the data.
  • Strong Community and Support
    Has an active community and provides extensive documentation, forums, and professional support options to assist users in overcoming challenges.
  • Performance
    Optimized for high performance, allowing for the rendering of large datasets without significant lag or performance issues.
  • Exporting and Sharing
    Built-in options for exporting charts to various formats (PNG, JPEG, PDF, etc.) and sharing them easily.

Possible disadvantages of Highcharts

  • Cost
    Highcharts is not free for commercial use, which may be a drawback for small businesses or individual developers with limited budgets.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite comprehensive documentation, the abundance of features and customization options can result in a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Dependency on JavaScript
    As a JavaScript library, Highcharts requires a solid understanding of JavaScript, making it less accessible for developers not familiar with the language.
  • Limited Free Support
    While there is a free support forum, professional support options are paid, which can be a limitation for users needing urgent assistance without extra costs.
  • Mobile Responsiveness
    Although Highcharts provides some support for mobile responsiveness, achieving optimal performance and displays on all device types may require additional customization.

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

Highcharts videos

Angular 2 & HighCharts Quick-Tip: Dynamic Data & Draggable Points (2016)

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to define the custom colors for Highcharts?
  • Review - Data Visualization HighCharts

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Grafana and Highcharts)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
66 66%
34% 34
Data Visualization
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

Grafana Reviews

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
13 tools to use for DevSecOps automation
🔓Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application that provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. Use the Grafana node to manage your dashboards, teams, and users.
Source: n8n.io

Highcharts Reviews

6 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Powerful Data Visualizations in 2023
However, you might need to pay for additional packages to get exactly what you’re looking for. The Highcharts Core package includes all the essentials (like line, bar, area, and pie charts) but Maps, Gantt, and Stock chart packages are all extra. In terms of cost, this makes Highcharts somewhat less scalable, depending on the budget available for your project.
Source: embeddable.com
15 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts
Highcharts is another very popular library for building graphs. It comes loaded with many different types of cool animations that are sufficient to attract many eyeballs to your website. Just like other libraries, Highcharts comes with many pre-built graphs like spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, etc. The charts are responsive and mobile-ready. Besides,...
Best Data Visualization Tools
For companies that want to embed interactive visualizations in their online content, look no further than Datawrapper. Highcharts is another great option for embedding interactive content into your sites, though it’s not as easy for non-specialists as Datawrapper.
Source: neilpatel.com
Top 10 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Every Data Visualization Need
Highcharts is one of the most comprehensive and popular JavaScript charting libraries based on HTML5, rendering in SVG/VML. It is lightweight, supports a wide range of diverse chart types, and ensures high performance.
Source: hackernoon.com
The Best Data Visualization Tools - Top 30 BI Software
Highcharts is a battle-tested SVG-based, multi-platform charting library that has been actively developed since 2009. Its JavaScript API integrates easily, and features robust documentation, advanced responsiveness and industry-leading accessibility support. You can add interactive, mobile-optimized charts to your web and mobile projects. Charts are rendered in SVG and a VML...
Source: improvado.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 218 times since March 2021. 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.

Grafana mentions (218)

  • What is O11y? Guide to Modern Observability
    Grafana serves as the industry-standard visualization platform that connects to multiple data sources. Creates sophisticated dashboards, supports alerting integration, and enables deep data exploration through custom panels and templates. - Source: dev.to / 14 days ago
  • Preparing your E-commerce Platform for Holiday Traffic: A Developer’s Guide
    Even with thorough preparation, the holiday traffic can bring unexpected challenges. To stay ahead, set up dashboards and alert systems using tools like Grafana, Datadog, or New Relic to monitor platform performance, track errors, and detect anomalies. Additionally, leverage analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel to identify drop-off points and optimize the customer journey. - Source: dev.to / 20 days ago
  • Understanding the MLOps Lifecycle
    Some popular tools for model monitoring include MLFlow, Grafana, and Prometheus. - Source: dev.to / 22 days ago
  • How to Monitor SQL Performance in Spring Boot
    Micrometer: Exports metrics to platforms like Prometheus and Grafana. - Source: dev.to / 29 days ago
  • Deploying NGINX as an Ingress Controller in Kubernetes: A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide with Architectural Diagram
    Implement monitoring and logging to track traffic patterns, performance, and security threats. Tools like Prometheus and Grafana are beneficial. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
View more

Highcharts mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Highcharts yet. Tracking of Highcharts recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

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.

Chart.js - Easy, object oriented client side graphs for designers and developers.

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

Google Charts - Interactive charts for browsers and mobile devices.