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Datadog vs Splunk 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
186
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) (9th)
Splunk APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 9.9%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk APM is 0.8%, up from 0.3% 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.
Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the elastic container service."
"Dashboards are helpful for reviewing occasionally to get a higher-level overview of what's happening."
"Flame graphs are pretty useful for understanding how GraphQL resolves our federated queries when it comes to identifying slow points in our requests. In our microservice environment with 170 services."
"Session recordings have been the most valuable to me as it helps me gain insights into user behaviour at scale."
"Thanks to frequent concurrent deployments, the DataDog alerts monitors allow us quickly detect issues if anything occurs."
"Its integration definitely stands out. It provides seamless monitoring of all our systems, services, apps, and whatever else we secure and monitor. Visualizations have become simpler with dashboards. We are getting visibility into systems, services, and apps stack through a single pane of glass, which is good. We are able to put logs in context."
"Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue."
"Splunk APM provides a holistic view of the application. Unlike other APMs, Splunk's service map is quite effective."
"The most beneficial aspect of Slunk APM is the ATM, which is the map displaying the inbound and outbound relationships of the microservices, as well as the traffic between these dependencies. This feature provides us with valuable insights and helps us understand the interactions between different microservices."
"The product's deployment phase is good and very easy because it is done with OpenTelemetry for most of the parts."
"The most valuable feature is dashboard creation."
"The most valuable features are troubleshooting and optimizing application performance."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"Splunk APM has helped us to standardize logging and monitoring procedures."
"It supports proactive management, enhances security, and improves operational efficiency."
 

Cons

"We would really like to see more from the Service Catalog."
"I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."
"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."
"While I like the ease of use, when compared with Tenable Nessus they could still improve their usability."
"I would also like to see an improvement in the server's data extraction times, as sometimes it can take up to ten minutes to download a report for a critical issue that is costing us money."
"Deploying the agents is still very manual."
"The product can be improved by allowing the grouping of APIs to add variables. That way, any API with a unique ID could be grouped together."
"Alerting timing should be improved to be more fine-tuned and exact."
"The UI enhancements could be a way to improve the solution in the future."
"It is essential for the monitoring tool to deliver quick response times when generating analytical reports, instead of prolonged delays."
"The cardinality is pretty low."
"Splunk's functionality could be improved by adding database connectors for other platforms like AWS and Azure."
"They can improve the flow system and the keyword language. It has predefined keywords, but they can be improved."
"There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available."
"Splunk APM's performance could be improved - at the moment, it's very slow and takes forever to give me what I want."
"There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"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."
"The tool is open-source."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"Splunk APM is a very cost-efficient solution."
"The price of Slunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"Splunk offers a 14-day free trial and after that, we have to pay but the cost is reasonable."
"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."
"The pricing is based on several factors, including the scale of deployment."
"Splunk APM is expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
39%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
11%
 

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 SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...
 

Comparisons

 

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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
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Splunk APM and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.