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Datadog vs Pandora FMS 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

Datadog
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
77th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
56th
Ranking in Log Management
62nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
45th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (26th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.5%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog2.5%
Pandora FMS0.6%
Other96.9%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Asociado/ at Infraestructura Informática
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The full stack of integrations made it easier to monitor the different technologies and platform providers, including Software as a Service providers, that otherwise would need a lot of work and customization to be able to see what is happening."
"The most valuable features have been: Sharable dashboards, TimeBoards, dogstatsd API, Slack Integration, Event logging API. CloudTrail Events, Tags, alerts, and anomaly detection. EBS Volume Snapshot Age, which they added upon request."
"Being able to filter requests by latency is invaluable, as it provides immediate insight into which endpoints require further analysis and optimization."
"The service catalog helped improve our organization by giving a good view of the flow for our microservices applications."
"Datadog helps us detect issues early on and helps in troubleshooting."
"The visibility that it provides is valuable. It is helping in being proactive around incident management. It is helping us to be able to get more visibility into our customers' applications so that we can assist them at the application layer. We also provide them the infrastructure from an AWS standpoint. We are able to make sure that our customers are aware of certain critical things around the analytical piece of either the network or the application. We're able to call customers before they even know about the issue. From there, we can start putting together some change management processes and help them a bit."
"The performance of Datadog is good."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities, especially for our Kubernetes clusters, have helped us optimize resource allocation and reduce costs."
"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"We are able to control our business with this all-in-one monitoring tool."
 

Cons

"There are things about it that we would like to be fixed, such as it is taking averages of average. This results in data that we don't expect."
"They need to implement template variables into the message response body."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"The pricing is a bit confusing."
"Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"The installation is easy for me. However, if you are new to this solution it might not be so easy."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
"I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"Their support is good, but it is just online communication. It would be great to be able to just call someone and talk to them instead of always writing. It works well for me because I am a decent communicator in email, but some people might find it difficult to describe in a written fashion and communicate with them that way. There is a learning curve to the interface, but once you get used to it, it is actually very powerful. They have a lot of options, but people struggle with the interface. They've improved it though, and it is getting better. They need to keep improving the learning curve to help buy-in. I'm the guy that manages it, so I'm comfortable with it. They can refine the upgrade agents to be easier. They can also do more refinement in end-user usability because not everyone is strong technically, and people who aren't strong technically might be averse to the product, even though it has come a long way. It has a complete GUI and everything."
"This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"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 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."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"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."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"You have to pay for the number of agents and models that you are monitoring. I would rate the cost at three with one being the most expensive and five being the cheapest."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
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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
Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Pandora FMS and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.