Apica vs Datadog comparison

Apica and Datadog are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Apica is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.9, while Datadog is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Apica holds a 0.3% mindshare in APM, compared to Datadog’s 9.0% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Apica users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Datadog users who would recommend it.

Apica

Read 10 Apica reviews

631 Views
378 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Datadog

Read 188 Datadog reviews

27,520 Views
17,205 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Apica

Datadog

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Datadog and Apica are key players in the system monitoring and performance management category. Datadog has an upper hand due to its extensive monitoring features and cloud integrations, while Apica excels in flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Features: Datadog provides a wide range of monitoring capabilities including sharable dashboards, anomaly detection, and seamless cloud integrations. It excels in intuitive tagging and automated updates, making it easy to monitor infrastructure without manual interference. Apica stands out with its flexibility in scripting and multi-protocol monitoring, allowing for complex scenarios without additional scripting. Its capacity to manage diverse use cases efficiently is a significant advantage.

Room for Improvement: Datadog faces challenges with its complex pricing structure, which users find confusing and expensive, leading to potential unexpected costs. Greater transparency in costs is a common request. Apica, on the other hand, has room to improve in alert aggregation and dashboard customization, with licensing checks being an area where unforeseen expenses could occur without careful management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog is appreciated for its adaptability in Hybrid and Public Cloud environments and generally strong customer service, although there are reports of delayed responses in Asia-Pacific. Apica provides consistent customer support with real-time chat features and excels in both Hybrid Cloud and On-premises setups, ensuring quick responses even on weekends.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog is a premium product with a costly pricing model, particularly for large deployments or high data ingestion rates. While its features offer good value, users desire more transparency and predictability in billing. Apica is considered cost-effective, particularly with bundled solutions like Synthetic and LoadTest, and offers a more straightforward pricing model, allowing clients to monitor effectively within budget constraints.

To learn more, read our detailed Apica vs. Datadog Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Apica vs. Datadog

February 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Apica

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

16th

Ranking in Log Management

18th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Operations Analytics (5th), Observability Pipeline Software (3rd)

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Ranking in Log Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

188

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Apica is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 9.0%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Noorul Mustafa Khan

Senior Associate Vice President at Wells Fargo

Validates content and perform login functionalities on front-end applications

First of all, it will depend on the type of application. If it's a web application, I would recommend implementing it in your lower environment first and checking for functionality. If you are satisfied, then push it to the higher environments. Apica has detected server-related issues and various web application-related issues promptly, alerting us in a timely manner. This allowed us to implement automation within our processes, ensuring comprehensive performance monitoring from failure detection to recovery. It was pretty easy to learn. I attended a couple of sessions with team members. They provided knowledge transfer, which took about a week. After that, I was able to onboard the company. However, for minor issues, I would still contact them. If you're a quick learner, it could take just a couple of weeks to get the hang of it. You can integrate Apica architect into your system because they provide APIs. With these APIs, you can utilize Apica where and when it's needed. For instance, you can create your own microservices to automate tasks or integrate it with tools like Postman. This flexibility allows you to embed Apica into various automation processes or any other functionalities you require. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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Kevin Palmer

DevOps/Security Principal at Raken

Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation

Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution’s real-time monitoring features have had a huge impact on our service delivery."

"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."

"It is easy for beginners to learn and use Apica."

"The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integrate with other tools with a separate execution environment. The tool is also easy to use."

"From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day."

"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."

"It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."

"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."

More Apica pros

"Its logs are most valuable."

"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."

"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities, especially for our Kubernetes clusters, have helped us optimize resource allocation and reduce costs."

"The most valuable features of Datadog are the flexibility and additional features when compared to other solutions, such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Some of the features include AI and ML capabilities and cloud and analysis monitoring"

"We enjoy the multistep API tests."

"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."

"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."

"Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"There are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time."

"The customer service and support were a little slow to respond. The browser sometimes checks alerts on unknown issues like latency from Apica's side."

"The initial screen on their dashboard could have a bit more data, but this is a small thing. It could have more data, so we do not need to drill down to a screen behind that initial information. I would like them to get a little better on the user interfaces that we need to go into."

"The tool does not provide automatic correlation features."

"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."

"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."

"If you are adding any input file, the tool fails to capture the path."

"It is difficult to create a script using ZebraTester."

More Apica cons

"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."

"I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment."

"I've found that the documentation is lacking in certain regards."

"The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that."

"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."

"I like the idea of monitoring on the go yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."

"We need more integration with security tools like Drata."

"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"License management is another area that Apica could do better. We have already had these conversations with our account teams. This is something that they are looking at largely improving in upcoming releases. I believe that this is already on their roadmap."

"The tool is completely free and open source. I've been using it for about two and a half years and installed it on both my personal and client machines without needing a license. All features are available for use without any hidden fees."

"The pricing is fair. It is neither too cheap nor too expensive."

"The solution's pricing is not cheap, but it is in the midrange."

"The pricing and licensing are very reasonable. At the end of the day, you are using their technology/software and getting X amount of checks for a very decent value. As for discounts, they try to meet your budgets as much as they can. For example, if you need 100 checks and you have X amount of budget for it, then they will try and get down to that price. Costing-wise, it is a reasonably cost product. They will always try and come down to your price if you need them to come down to it by knocking off certain areas."

"The pricing is very reasonable, but it is not cheap."

"Another main difference between Apica and the other products was the cost. We really thought that the balance in Apica between the features and costs was the best among all the products on which we did a PoC."

"I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides."

More Apica pricing and cost advice

"This solution is budget friendly."

"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."

"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."

"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."

"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."

"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Media Company

Educational Organization

39%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apica Synthetic?

The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integr...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apica Synthetic?

I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Apica Synthetic?

Apica is costly, and there's no way to test mobile applications through Apica. You can test mobile applications through other platforms. However, Apica is only for APIs and applications.

See all answers

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

See all answers

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?

With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs Apica

Compared 28% of the time

Cribl vs Apica

Compared 16% of the time

AlertSite vs Apica

Compared 15% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Apica

Compared 15% of the time

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Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 13% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apica

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Datadog

February 2025

Download Datadog product report

Also Known As

Apica LoadTest, Apica Synthetic

No data available

Overview

Apica offers a unified platform to remove complexity and cost associated with data management. You collect, control, store, and observe your data and can quickly identify and resolve performance issues before they impact the end-user. Apica Ascent swiftly analyzes telemetry data in real-time, enabling prompt issue resolution, while automated root cause analysis, powered by machine learning, streamlines troubleshooting in complex distributed systems. The platform simplifies data collection by automating and managing agents through the platform’s Fleet product. Its Flow product simplifies and optimizes pipeline control with AI and ML to help you easily understand complex workflows. Its Store component allows you to never run out of storage space while you index and store machine data centrally on one platform and reduce costs, and remediate faster. Observe offers modern observability data management, helping you with MELT data, effortless dashboarding, and seamless integration of synthetic and real data.

Experience the Apica Ascent Platform

Apica

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

Datadog

Sample Customers

HBO, JPMC, Morgan Stanley, Xander, EA Sports, Volvo

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's

Buyer's Guide

Apica vs. Datadog

February 2025

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