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Datadog vs SolarWinds AppOptics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
207
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th)
SolarWinds AppOptics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
57th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
58th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
45th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 6.6%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds AppOptics is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog6.6%
SolarWinds AppOptics0.5%
Other92.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
John Yuko - PeerSpot reviewer
Unique features allow consolidating and combing metrics into a single dashboard, but don't monitor mobile solutions
I would like to see more granular information provided on Unix applications. Also, the integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward in terms having an agent to retrieve your credentials rather than having to enter or save them for SSH on SolarWinds. From the outset, we had to set some commands to log into the search console, and they are saved on the solution, which presents a challenge in terms of exposure. The solution is unable to monitor APK solutions completely because we'd then be forced to break down the APK and provide the APIs or go through the source code. They don't have a module that can analyze an application that is maybe under-used.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Several critical dashboards were created years ago and are still in use today."
"Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"I don't have to worry about upgrades with the AWS version."
"It has enhanced the performance of my team."
"APM and tracing are super useful."
"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."
"Its logs are most valuable."
"The reporting of the solution is very good."
"The sum solution, NTA, and DPA."
"The product has a great dashboard."
"Technical support is always live and they're supportive."
"I have found the most valuable feature is application performance management."
"Some of the most valuable features of SolarWinds are the topology discovery and network performance analysis."
 

Cons

"Another issue that I have is with the search syntax, it could be simpler and it feels like there are too many ways to do the same things."
"The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances."
"One thing we have run into is that it is so easy to add monitoring that we turn on things without really understanding the costs."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"Stability of the product has been a concern for us outside of the primary monitoring agents."
"We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"I would like to see more integration with other tools that are available on the market."
"In terms of the technology, I think they need to put some more advanced troubleshooting into SolarWinds, in terms of AI capabilities. That's the next generation, especially in the cases of APIs which have already adopted AI capabilities into their products."
"The integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward."
"The solution should be more user-friendly."
"AppOptics would benefit from having a much more centralized view."
"The implementation needs improvement. It needs to get modernized with the newer cloud scenario in both public and private deployment models."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"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."
"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."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"​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."
"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"Mostly, it's a perpetual license. We don't have any customers using the subscription right now—it's mostly a perpetual license that the customers purchase. The licensing is based on the number of elements, whereas other solutions are node-based."
"Since it's a negotiable rate, I would rate the pricing as a five out of five."
"I believe the current licensing cost is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise95
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
 

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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Also Known As

No data available
AppOptics, SolarWinds TraceView, Librato
 

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. SolarWinds AppOptics and other solutions. Updated: October 2025.
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