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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
208
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

"I really enjoy the RUM monitoring features of Datadog. It allows us to monitor user behavior in a way we couldn't before."
"The setup cost was minimal."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"The most valuable features of Datadog are the flexibility and additional features when compared to other solutions, such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Some of the features include AI and ML capabilities and cloud and analysis monitoring"
"If we have a large load for users using our basic Datadog, it will immediately fire off an alert notifying us either something's wrong or not."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"Log management is a great way for me to identify changes in behavior across services and environments as we make changes or as user behavior evolves."
"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"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."
"Pandora's architecture is interesting. It's open so you can easily extend and enhance it. It's simpler to customize Pandora compared to other solutions. It's also scalable enough to support large environments."
"We are able to control our business with this all-in-one monitoring tool."
"The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."
"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
 

Cons

"The pricing is a bit confusing."
"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."
"Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible."
"It would also be nice if we had more insight into our own usage of Datadog (agents and custom metrics). They provide a usage page which does help, but it is not in real-time."
"We would like to see some versioning system for the Synthetic Tests so that we could have a backup of our tests since they are time-consuming to make and very easy to damage in a moment of error."
"Interactive tutorials could be a game changer."
"Their security features could be improved. We looked at their Security Monitoring feature but it was early in its development. Datadog are just getting into the security space so I'm sure this will improve in the future."
"I found the solution to be stable, I did not experience any bugs or glitches. However, some of the managing team did."
"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."
"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 would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"The product lacks APIs for integration with other systems."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"A nice feature in the next release would be an automation module to run workflow actions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"​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."
"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."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"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 Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"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."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
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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
11%
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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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 ...
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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.
882,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.