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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 (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
78th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
55th
Ranking in Log Management
63rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
45th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, 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 (%)
Datadog2.4%
Pandora FMS0.6%
Other97.0%
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

"Our teams use Datadog more than they used their old observability tool—they're more production-aware, conscious of how their changes are impacting customers, how the changes they make to their application speed up or slow down their app, and the overall request flow."
"The single pane of glass view with maneuvering between products has helped us to truly understand root causes after incidents."
"Datadog has positively impacted our organization, as it has eliminated many negative issues, which I call tool sprawl, by replacing four or five separate monitoring tools with one unified platform."
"Dashboards are helpful for reviewing occasionally to get a higher-level overview of what's happening."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"We also use APM and metrics to view the status of our Pub/Sub topics and queues, especially when dealing with undelivered messages."
"Datadog has had a significant positive impact on our organization overall, particularly in visibility, reliability, and cost efficiency, allowing us to centralize metrics, logs, and traces across our cloud, moving from reactive to proactive monitoring, with improvements including faster incident detection and resolution, enhanced service reliability, better cost and resource optimization, and shared dashboards providing the engineering and product teams a single source of truth for system health and performance, thus enhancing our overall observability and operational efficiency."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."
"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."
"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 administration of the console is very easy. I like that Pandora FMS is interactive and easy to manage."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"Could be a little more user friendly."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
"The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"We need more integration with security tools like Drata."
"We primarily use the log management functionality, and the only feedback I have there is better fuzzy text searching in logs (the kind that Kibana has)."
"There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields."
"The FinOps needs improvement."
"I would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"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 FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these."
"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."
"An update to the Android app would be appreciated."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"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."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
"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."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
12%
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
 

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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.
881,282 professionals have used our research since 2012.