The 3 real alternatives to Grafana dashboards

Looking for an alternative to Grafana dashboards? Here are the three options you should be considering.

Adam Kinniburgh

VP Innovation, SquaredUp

Grafana is one of the most popular open-source platforms for observability and data visualization. It has long been a popular choice for dashboarding, relied on by the Prometheus community to turn raw metrics into rich, attractive dashboards.

But if you’re reading this, you may be struggling with Grafana for one of several reasons:

Steep learning curve
Limited integrations
High sharing costs
Too low-level for management
Dashboard sprawl

You will find many ‘alternatives’ guides that compare Grafana to all-in-one monitoring tools like Datadog, Dynatrace and SigNoz. There are hundreds of monitoring tools to choose from, but what if you don't need another monitoring tool and just want better dashboards?

There are also dozens of BI-style tools to choose from, such as Power BI, Tableau, and Looker. However, these are typically SQL-based reporting tools designed for business data analysts. Engineering teams require real-time operational data direct from a variety of databases and other tools with APIs.

So, when it comes to real-time, operational dashboards, there are only three real alternatives to Grafana dashboards:

SquaredUp
Perses
Kibana

Let’s look at each in turn. We’ll consider how they compare to Grafana, and when you might choose each.

1. SquaredUp

Modern, easy-to-use, monitoring dashboards for a wide variety of data sources

SquaredUp connects to over 60 data sources – including Prometheus – to offer flexible, easy-to-use dashboards. Unlike Grafana, which can demand steep learning curves and heavy configuration, SquaredUp delivers a low-code dashboarding experience designed to bridge the gap between technical users and business stakeholders.

It is a cloud-hosted solution with a simple sign-up and a useful free tier.

Key features

User-friendly: Designed with both experts and non-experts in mind, making it accessible for every member of the team.
Wide range of integrations: Including Prometheus, Azure, AWS, Jira, GitHub, ServiceNow, Elasticsearch, PowerShell, SQL, Jenkins, VMware.
Flexible, low-cost sharing: One-click sharing, with a flexible ‘pay as you go’ pricing model.
Status RollUp views: Simple Red-Amber-Green status views for rolling up to management and operations teams.

SquaredUp is a great option if you’re looking for something easy to use which can pull data in from many different sources, and sharing across different personas and teams is important.

Learn more about SquaredUp

2. Perses

An emerging open-source project focused on Prometheus dashboards, open standards, and automation

Perses, started in 2021, is an open source project designed to be a direct replacement for Grafana’s Prometheus data visualization. Unlike Grafana, which has changed to the less permissive AGPLv3 license, Perses is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is a CNCF project (currently at the Sandbox maturity level).

Perses is gaining adoption by observability vendors looking to embed dashboards into their tools, such as Chronosphere and Dash0.

Key features

Open-source and self-hosted: It is currently not available as a SaaS option.
Open specification for dashboards: Perses is also an initiative to define a standardized dashboard specification, fostering interoperability across observability tools.
Strong integration with Prometheus, Tempo, and Jaeger: With plans to extend to further data sources.

Perses is a great option if you need Prometheus visualization, and open-source, self-hosting, and open standards are important to you.

Learn more about Perses

3. Kibana

The oldest of the bunch – flexible dashboards designed for Elasticsearch

Kibana is widely used with Elasticsearch or Logstash from the Elastic Stack. Grafana was originally a fork of Kibana, adding time-series visualization capabilities. Kibana has since been forked again as part of Amazon OpenSearch (specifically ‘OpenSearch Dashboards’).

Kibana offers robust support for exploring log and event data, powerful query capabilities, and visualizations tailored to time-series and search-heavy use cases. If your observability stack is already built around Elasticsearch, Kibana fits naturally into your workflow.

However, Kibana is highly tied to Elastic – and that’s both its strength and its limitation. It’s not designed to pull in data from other tools, and creating dashboards can require significant knowledge of Elasticsearch queries and schemas.

Key features

Designed specifically for Elasticsearch: data needs to be ingested into Elasticsearch to be visualized in Kibana
Customizable dashboards with sharing: sharing via direct links, exporting as PDF, PNG, CSV, or JSON files, and embedding dashboards on websites
Self-hosted or SaaS: install locally or use Elastic Cloud

Kibana is best for those already fully invested in the Elastic Stack. Integration with other data sources such as Prometheus requires importing the data into Elasticsearch.

Learn more about Kibana

Conclusion

While there are many options for general monitoring and observability tools, there are very few alternatives to Grafana that are standalone dashboards. Kibana and Perses are two specialized dashboards (for Elasticsearch and Prometheus respectively), but many teams are looking for a dashboard that can integrate with multiple data sources. SquaredUp is the most direct alternative: with a easier learning curve, greater breadth of integrations, and more flexible sharing options.