StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Log Management
  4. Log Management
  5. Kibana vs Papertrail

Kibana vs Papertrail

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Papertrail
Papertrail
Stacks605
Followers378
Votes273
Kibana
Kibana
Stacks20.6K
Followers16.4K
Votes262
GitHub Stars20.8K
Forks8.5K

Kibana vs Papertrail: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This markdown code compares the key differences between Kibana and Papertrail for website use.

1. **User Interface**: Kibana offers a highly customizable and visually appealing user interface that allows users to create complex visualizations and dashboards. In contrast, Papertrail has a more straightforward and streamlined interface focused on log management and searching tasks.
   
2. **Feature Set**: Kibana is a robust tool with a wide range of features such as data visualization, reporting, and machine learning capabilities. On the other hand, Papertrail primarily focuses on log aggregation, monitoring, and real-time log searching without the extensive visualization capabilities of Kibana.
   
3. **Use Case**: Kibana is often used in conjunction with Elasticsearch for analyzing and visualizing large volumes of data, making it suitable for data analysis and business intelligence purposes. Papertrail, on the other hand, is commonly used by developers and system administrators for monitoring and troubleshooting applications by analyzing log data.
   
4. **Integration**: Kibana seamlessly integrates with Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Beats (ELK stack) to provide a comprehensive data analysis solution. In contrast, Papertrail can be integrated with various services and platforms but primarily focuses on log management without the extensive integration options offered by Kibana.
   
5. **On-Premises Deployment**: Kibana can be deployed on-premises, offering users more control over their data and infrastructure. Papertrail, on the other hand, is a cloud-based service hosted by SolarWinds, limiting users' control over the storage and management of log data.
   
6. **Cost Structure**: Kibana is an open-source software with a free version available, but there are costs involved in setting up and maintaining the ELK stack infrastructure. Papertrail offers a subscription-based model with a range of pricing plans based on log volume, providing a more straightforward cost structure for users.

In Summary, Kibana and Papertrail differ in their user interfaces, feature sets, use cases, integration options, deployment methods, and cost structures.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Papertrail, Kibana

matteo1989it
matteo1989it

Jun 26, 2019

ReviewonKibanaKibanaGrafanaGrafanaElasticsearchElasticsearch

I use both Kibana and Grafana on my workplace: Kibana for logging and Grafana for monitoring. Since you already work with Elasticsearch, I think Kibana is the safest choice in terms of ease of use and variety of messages it can manage, while Grafana has still (in my opinion) a strong link to metrics

757k views757k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

663k views663k
Comments
abrahamfathman
abrahamfathman

Jun 26, 2019

ReviewonKibanaKibanaSplunkSplunkGrafanaGrafana

I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.

2.29M views2.29M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Papertrail
Papertrail
Kibana
Kibana

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Intuitive Web-based log viewer;Powerful command-line tools;Long-term archive (S3);REST API;Team-wide groups and searches;Automated export for tables and charts;Search alerts;Easy SQL analytics (Hadoop);Unlimited systems and users;Encrypted logging
Flexible analytics and visualization platform;Real-time summary and charting of streaming data;Intuitive interface for a variety of users;Instant sharing and embedding of dashboards
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
20.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
8.5K
Stacks
605
Stacks
20.6K
Followers
378
Followers
16.4K
Votes
273
Votes
262
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 85
    Log search
  • 43
    Easy log aggregation across multiple machines
  • 43
    Integrates with Heroku
  • 37
    Simple interface
  • 26
    Backup to S3
Cons
  • 2
    Expensive
  • 1
    External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging
Pros
  • 88
    Easy to setup
  • 65
    Free
  • 45
    Can search text
  • 21
    Has pie chart
  • 13
    X-axis is not restricted to timestamp
Cons
  • 7
    Unintuituve
  • 4
    Elasticsearch is huge
  • 4
    Works on top of elastic only
  • 3
    Hardweight UI
Integrations
Slack
Slack
Heroku
Heroku
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS
OpsGenie
OpsGenie
New Relic
New Relic
Librato
Librato
HipChat
HipChat
Logstash
Logstash
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
Beats
Beats

What are some alternatives to Papertrail, Kibana?

Grafana

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Prometheus

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Logmatic

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

Nagios

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Graylog

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Zabbix

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana