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Datadog vs Grafana Loki comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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 Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 6.1%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.5%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

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.
CarlosPimentel - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient log filtering enhances quick network troubleshooting
We use Grafana Loki for various verticals including manufacturing, finance, health, and aerospatial sectors. It primarily helps in monitoring security and access to devices. Grafana dashboards are used to track access success and failure and audit commands issued on devices Loki significantly…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents."
"Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue."
"It lets us react more quickly to things going wrong. Whereas before, it might have been 30 minutes to an hour before we noticed something going on, we will know within a minute or two if something is off, which will let us essentially get something back up and running faster for our customers, which is revenue."
"Its logs are most valuable."
"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities, especially for our Kubernetes clusters, have helped us optimize resource allocation and reduce costs."
"The solution has helped our organization with custom events to track specific cases."
"The initial setup was straightforward from my own experience, helping integrate within the application and service levels."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
 

Cons

"The FinOps needs improvement."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"We'd like to see more advanced incident management capabilities integrated directly into the platform."
"It's not that straightforward when creating an alert. The syntax is a little confusing."
"One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote."
"I'm not sure what kind of features are in the roadmap right now, but I encourage the development of features for defining your organization, and allowing the visibility of what kind of metrics you can get. Those features would be really useful for us."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"The product must improve its UI."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"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."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."
"We use a free version."
"The solution is open source."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
32%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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 Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
We use the open-source version of Loki. The cloud version is competitively priced compared to other market solutions.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers.
 

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
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