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Datadog vs Prometheus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.1
Datadog enhances efficiency, reduces downtime, and improves ROI by tracking instances, visualizing trends, and resolving performance issues.
Sentiment score
8.5
Prometheus is a cost-effective, open-source monitoring tool offering significant financial and time-saving benefits over AWS native services.
Using open-source Prometheus saves me money compared to AWS native services.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Datadog's customer service is proactive and knowledgeable, but technical support quality varies with occasional delays and inconsistencies.
Sentiment score
4.0
Prometheus users benefit from extensive documentation, open-source community support, and forums, eliminating the need for traditional support.
Prometheus does not offer traditional technical support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog efficiently scales with infrastructure demands, offering seamless integration and reliability, though cost management is essential.
Sentiment score
6.9
Prometheus is highly scalable and adaptable for diverse businesses, effectively handling demands in both cloud and on-premise environments.
Prometheus is scalable, with a rating of ten out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliable stability, minimal disruptions, quick issue resolution, and efficient large-scale data handling.
Sentiment score
8.9
Prometheus is deemed stable and dependable by users, despite minor issues, especially with proper configuration and resource management.
Deploying it on multiple instances or using Kubernetes for automatic management has enhanced its stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Datadog users desire performance improvements, consistent APIs, clearer pricing, better support, enhanced features, and more user-friendly documentation and interface.
Prometheus requires enhancements in usability, scalability, integration, and features to improve user experience and monitoring efficiency.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
There should be a clearer view of the expenses.
 

Setup Cost

Datadog offers flexible, usage-based enterprise pricing, focusing on host count and log ingestion, requiring careful management to control costs.
Prometheus is cost-effective due to its open-source nature, with optional paid services considered reasonably priced by users.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Prometheus is cost-effective for me as it is free.
 

Valuable Features

Datadog excels with integration, customizable dashboards, and monitoring, offering streamlined setup, centralized data, and enhanced user insights.
Prometheus excels in scalability, integration, and flexibility, offering robust features like dynamic monitoring and Grafana compatibility for diverse environments.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
The technology itself is generally very useful.
It allows me to save money by avoiding costs associated with AWS native services like CloudWatch or Amazon Prometheus.
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)
Prometheus
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 9.0%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prometheus is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities
Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform. It is free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities. It allows me to save money by avoiding costs associated with AWS native services like CloudWatch or Amazon Prometheus. The ability to deploy on any cloud platform or environment, including Kubernetes, is a major advantage.
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838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
39%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 ...
What do you like most about Prometheus?
The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Prometheus?
Prometheus is cost-effective for me as it is free. Using cloud-native alternatives like Amazon Prometheus would incur charges.
What is your primary use case for Prometheus?
I use Prometheus for monitoring purposes in IT infrastructure. It is particularly useful for environments using Kubernetes, as it monitors ports, containers, instances, and applications effectively.
 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Prometheus and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.