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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

"Even if something goes wrong and the Datadog tenant becomes completely compromised or if all our monitors were to get erased for whatever reason, we can always restore all our monitoring setup through Terraform, which provides peace of mind."
"The real-time data helps us make informed decisions and optimize our operations, ultimately enhancing our overall efficiency and performance."
"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"Datadog's visibility and debugging features help me day-to-day; specifically, we had an application that was throwing a bunch of errors causing an issue in our production database, and using Datadog, we were able to immediately isolate the error and plan around it."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs."
"Dashboards are helpful for reviewing occasionally to get a higher-level overview of what's happening."
"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"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."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"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."
"You can configure several types of architecture for high availability or load balancing."
"I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly."
"Thanks to its flexibility, I have been able to adapt the tool to our servers and find out quickly how their console works."
"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."
 

Cons

"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"For three to four months, we have been experiencing real-time delays. For example, if we're monitoring incoming traffic, the real-time status should be displayed up to a certain point. However, due to delays or issues with Datadog, the real-time data might only be updated at an earlier time. We are experiencing consistent delays in data updates from Datadog, with the most recent data often being delayed by about an hour. This issue has been ongoing for the past four months."
"I sometimes log in and see items changed, either in the UI or a feature enabled. To see it for the first time without proper communication can sometimes come as a shock."
"We need to learn more about the session reply feature inside of DD."
"I like the idea of monitoring on the go, however, it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."
"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"It does not have the best interface."
"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."
"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"I would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status."
"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."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is budget friendly."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"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."
"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."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"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."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"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."
"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."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"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
14%
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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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.
882,479 professionals have used our research since 2012.