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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 (2nd), 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 March 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 8.9%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 6.4%, up from 5.7% 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

"The most valuable features are the dashboards and the reporting."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"The setup cost was minimal."
"Datadog infrastructure monitoring has helped us identify health issues with our virtual machines, such as high load, CPU, and disk usage, as well as monitoring uptime and alerting when Kubernetes containers have a bad time staying up."
"Datadog is providing efficiency in the products we develop for the wireless device engineering department."
"Datadog is easy to use and easy to deploy. It's a better solution compared to others on the market in terms of being budget friendly for our customers."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"It has enhanced the performance of my team."
"Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana is the ease to build dashboards from observability construction. Additionally, the page services and integration are good."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"The installation process is easy. We have deployed it on the cloud. I have around 20 to 30 people using the solution in my company."
"The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly."
"The dashboards are very easy to work with."
"Provides good dashboard visualization."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
 

Cons

"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
"Interactive tutorials could be a game changer."
"We need to learn more about the session reply feature inside of DD."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."
"I like the idea of monitoring on the go yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"There is room for improvement when using multiple dashboards because they can become complicated to keep track of and use."
"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."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"Its interface could be more accessible."
"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"The tool is open-source."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"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."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"The solution is expensive."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"We are using the open-source license."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
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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.
842,690 professionals have used our research since 2012.