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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 dashboards and the performance of the software have been great."
"The interface and the integrations make it so easy to connect to the cloud or to the on-premise environment."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"When I reflect on the ways we used to track down issues, I can't imagine how we ever managed before Datadog."
"The setup cost was minimal."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."
"Being able to filter requests by latency is invaluable, as it provides immediate insight into which endpoints require further analysis and optimization."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them."
"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."
"We are able to control our business with this all-in-one monitoring tool."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly."
"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
 

Cons

"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"Datadog could improve its pricing because it is very tricky, and most of our customers notice many hidden costs."
"Datadog is a platform that can be improved by making its pricing more predictable, as sometimes it is difficult to forecast exactly how much a new project will cost until after we have started ingesting the data."
"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."
"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"At the beginning, when we started throwing logs at it, there was a bit of hiccup. However, this was during their beta period, so hiccups were expected."
"The query performance could be improved, particularly when handling large datasets, as slower response times can hinder efficiency."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"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."
"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."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"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."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
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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%
Government
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
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

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 ...
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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: January 2026.
882,032 professionals have used our research since 2012.