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Datadog vs Pandora FMS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 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 Network Monitoring Software
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
45th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
43rd
Ranking in Log Management
36th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
28th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.3%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

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.
Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"We have found that we're able to get in and out of troubleshooting issues much more rapidly, which in turn, of course, enables us to spend more time on our products."
"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."
"Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams."
"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."
"The tools are powerful and intuitive to set up."
"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."
"The web app has a real-time support chat window in which a support engineer is chatting with you within a minute."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"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 official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."
"We are able to control our business with this all-in-one monitoring tool."
"The solution is so lightweight that with only 4GB of ram, it allows keeping track of up to two hundred agents from a single console."
 

Cons

"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"I would also like to see an improvement in the server's data extraction times, as sometimes it can take up to ten minutes to download a report for a critical issue that is costing us money."
"We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard."
"The pricing should be less of a surprise."
"It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs."
"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"They need to implement template variables into the message response body."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"An update to the Android app would be appreciated."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"In the future, we may have double the number of devices, and we do not want to have any issues with performance in the data display."
"Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas."
"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"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."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"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."
"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."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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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: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.