What is Kibana used for?

Kibana is the web interface for querying, visualizing and managing data stored in Elasticsearch, used for dashboards, observability and analytics. It is a good fit for log analysis on top of Elasticsearch and building operational dashboards.

Is Kibana open source?

Yes. Kibana is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at elastic/kibana and is written mainly in TypeScript.

Yes. Kibana is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence. A managed cloud version is also available.

Can I self-host Kibana?

Yes. Kibana can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Kibana an alternative to?

Kibana is an open-source alternative to Splunk, Datadog, New Relic and Sumo Logic. Other open-source alternatives to Splunk include OpenObserve, Grafana Loki and Graylog.

Is Kibana actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Kibana was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v9.5.4, published on 15 September 2026. The project has 21k stars on GitHub.

Kibana: open-source alternative to Splunk, Datadog

About Kibana

Kibana is the user interface that sits on top of Elasticsearch. It lets people query, analyze, visualize and manage the data stored there, turning indexes into charts, metrics views and dashboards. It is part of the Elastic Stack and is commonly used for log analysis, observability and general analytics work.

Teams build visualizations and assemble them into shared dashboards, explore documents with search, and use the interface to manage parts of an Elasticsearch deployment. The project advises running Kibana and Elasticsearch at the same version, with major versions required to match, because mismatches can cause problems and support may ask for an upgrade first.

The code is written in TypeScript. The repository lists its license as 'Other' rather than a standard SPDX identifier, so the license files should be read for the exact terms. Kibana can be downloaded and run on your own infrastructure, and Elastic also offers a hosted version through its Cloud service.

Key features

Query and explore Elasticsearch data
Visualizations and metrics charts
Shared dashboards for monitoring
Observability views for logs and metrics
Management tools for Elasticsearch data
Hosted option through Elastic Cloud

Good fit for

→Log analysis on top of Elasticsearch
→Building operational dashboards

Built with: TypeScript
Tags: elasticsearch; dashboards; visualization; observability; analytics; logs; metrics; elastic-stack

Kibana: questions and answers

What is Kibana used for?: Kibana is the web interface for querying, visualizing and managing data stored in Elasticsearch, used for dashboards, observability and analytics. It is a good fit for log analysis on top of Elasticsearch and building operational dashboards.
Is Kibana open source?: Yes. Kibana is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at elastic/kibana and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is Kibana free?: Yes. Kibana is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence. A managed cloud version is also available.
Can I self-host Kibana?: Yes. Kibana can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Kibana an alternative to?: Kibana is an open-source alternative to Splunk, Datadog, New Relic and Sumo Logic. Other open-source alternatives to Splunk include OpenObserve, Grafana Loki and Graylog.
Is Kibana actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Kibana was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v9.5.4, published on 15 September 2026. The project has 21k stars on GitHub.