Kibanavs
Elastic Stack
Elastic Stack: Search, Observability, and Security Solutions
Kibana
Visualize Your Elasticsearch Data
As of 30 August 2026, Kibana is free to use. Kibana is a free and open-source user interface that lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data. Softwr lists it under Logging. Kibana is made by Elastic, launched in 2011, available on Web, API.
Overview
What Kibana does
Kibana is a free and open-source user interface that lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data.
What people use it for
- Querying and visualising data held in Elasticsearch
- Dashboards over log and metric data
- Anomaly detection with machine learning jobs
- Geospatial analysis on indexed location data
- Alerting on query thresholds
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Kibana.
- Requires Elasticsearch; it is a front end for data held there rather than a standalone analytics tool
- Self-managed means running and scaling the Elastic stack yourself
- Cost is not Kibana's own; it follows whichever Elastic deployment sits underneath
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Kibana
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- KibanavsDatadog Logs
Datadog Logs: Log Management and Analytics
- KibanavsNew Relic
New Relic: Observability made simple
- KibanavsCoralogix
Coralogix: Continuous Log Insights and Visibility
Pricing
What Kibana costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- Data visualization
- Dashboard creation
- Log discovery
Capabilities
Features
Data visualization
Dashboard creation
Log discovery
Alerting
API
Integration with API
Webhooks
Integration with Webhooks
REST
Integration with REST
Web support
Available on web
Api support
Available on api
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is Kibana available for free?
Kibana is offered with a free trial across all deployment models (Elastic Cloud Serverless, Hosted, and self-managed). Kibana is a component of the Elastic product suite and is not priced separately.
SourceHow is Kibana priced?
Kibana pricing is bundled with Elasticsearch or other Elastic products. Pricing varies by deployment model: Elastic Cloud Serverless uses usage-based pricing, Hosted uses resource-based pricing, and self-managed is free to download.
SourceBehind it
Who makes Kibana
- Company
- Elastic
- Based in
- United States
Keep looking
Where to go from Kibana
- Kibana alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Kibana pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Kibana badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Logging softwareThe full category
- Best Logging softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Logging software for
Compare Kibana with
- New Relic
- Datadog Logs
- Coralogix
- InfluxDB
- Elastic
- Fluentd
- Graylog
- Traceloop
- Logz.io
- Grafana Loki
- incident.io
- Retrace
- Rollbar
- Sematext
- Splunk Cloud
- Stackdriver
- Telegraf
- Splunk Enterprise
Other Logging software
Continuous Log Insights and Visibility
Free, then $0.42/GB (logs ingestion)10 researched notesPurpose-built time series database for metrics and events
Free, then $0.0025/MB ingested12 researched notesLLM reliability platform with open-source observability and evaluation
Free plan10 researched notesSoftware reliability platform with on-call management and agentic root cause analysis
Free plan11 researched notesThe Plugin-Driven Server Agent for Collecting and Reporting Metrics
Free plan10 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Kibana, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Kibana
Kibana alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Kibana pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Kibana
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Kibana badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Logging software alternatives
Software reliability platform with on-call management and agentic root cause analysis
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Status pages with uptime monitoring and compliance-ready incident tracking
LLM reliability platform with open-source observability and evaluation
Freemium with pay-as-you-go enterprise option
Active reliability platform combining uptime monitoring, API testing, and incident response
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