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Datadog vs Grafana comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

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

Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 8.8%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 6.4%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"Since we integrated Datadog, we have had increased confidence in the quality of our service, and we had an easier time increasing our delivery velocity."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"The dashboards provide a comprehensive and visually intuitive way to monitor all our key data points in real-time, making it easier to spot trends and potential issues."
"It helps us better manage our logs."
"Datadog dashboards are pretty great."
"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"The solution has good features."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
 

Cons

"I've found that the documentation is lacking in certain regards."
"One area where Datadog could be improved is its pricing structure, which can sometimes make it cost-prohibitive to adopt new features."
"A big problem with Datadog is the billing. They need to make the billing more user-friendly."
"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."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"It seems that admin cost control granularity is an afterthought."
"It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"Grafana could improve by having its own query language. Currently, it uses languages like Prometheus or InfluxDB, which not everyone knows. Their query language should be easier."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement."
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
"There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The tool is open-source."
"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."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"The solution is expensive."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"I am using an open-source version"
"We are using the open-source license."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
37%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
I used the open-source version for my learning, which was free. In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs. I think predictive capabilities in ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.