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AWS X-Ray vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

AWS X-Ray
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 1.8%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 5.3%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog5.3%
AWS X-Ray1.8%
Other92.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Muhmad Tabrez A Deewanji - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Improving performance through efficient trace metrics and data insights
As an application developer and architect, I appreciate AWS X-Ray for checking latency and identifying bottlenecks. I use it for performance tuning, conducting performance testing on applications, getting real-time traces, and gaining data insights. It helps in improving throughput and tuning infrastructure. The trace metrics and data collected provide valuable insights.
Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."
"AWS X-Ray's endpoints and user monitoring are considered the most valuable features."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."
"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."
"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."
"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."
"The best feature of AWS X-Ray is the ability to correlate data out of the box, ensuring that if one service calls another service, it will provide a full flow of what has happened without needing to build or develop anything around it."
"We have been able to set very specific CPU and memory alerts, at the very base level, then we started to pull real business value, like 99th percentile response rates for our API calls."
"Datadog agents act as an integration to different services, providing easy access and management."
"Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features."
"It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system."
"It has a nice UI."
"The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents."
"The installation step is pretty straightforward."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
 

Cons

"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."
"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."
"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."
"Like most Amazon products, the user interface, configuration, and tuning aren't the easiest. That's the biggest reason why people tend to go to products like TerraForm and Terragrunt. We use TerraForm and Terragrunt. So, for setting things up and interacting with X-Ray, it's definitely the user interface that can be better."
"AWS X-Ray should improve its implementation process to make it easier for developers."
"Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts."
"The UI has a lot going on. It should be simpler and have a better way to onboard someone new to using Datadog."
"The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"​It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"I would like to see the integration between PagerDuty and Datadog improved. The tags in Datadog don't match those in PagerDuty, and we have to make it work."
"Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."
"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"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 price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"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."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?
While I have not compared it with GCP or Azure ( /products/microsoft-azure-reviews ), AWS generally offers cost-effective services. Some services, like Athena ( /products/odyssey-software-athena-eo...
What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?
The challenges we faced with AWS X-Ray were that some of the AWS services we were using did not support it, which we discovered at a later stage. This was potentially a design consideration we shou...
What is your primary use case for AWS X-Ray?
I have been using AWS X-Ray for creating insights to our applications we have developed. It is used to correlate different services in AWS when a transaction happens, allowing us to see the flow of...
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...
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...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
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
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,333 professionals have used our research since 2012.