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Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Datadog boosts ROI by reducing downtime, enhancing reliability, optimizing resources, improving cost efficiency, and expediting issue resolution.
Sentiment score
6.3
Splunk Enterprise Security improves efficiency and threat detection, reducing time and costs despite its expense for larger organizations.
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
I believe features that would provide a lot of time savings, just enabling you to really narrow down and filter the type of frustration or user interaction that you're looking for.
QA Engineer at Townsquare Interactive
The documentation for Splunk Enterprise Security is outstanding. It is well-organized and easy to access.
DevOps&Cloud Engineer Mentee at CertDirectory.io
We couldn't calculate what would have been the cost if they had actually gotten compromised; however, they were in the process, so every investment was returned immediately.
Business Development Manager at Axians Germany
On average, my SecOps team takes probably at least a quarter of the time, if not more, to remediate security incidents with Splunk Enterprise Security compared to our previous solution.
IT Orchestration Architect at Penn State University
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog offers knowledgeable support but has variable ticket resolution and communication challenges, with limited direct engineer access.
Sentiment score
6.3
Splunk Enterprise Security is highly rated for support expertise, though some users report delays and inconsistent experiences.
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
Systems Administrator at Townsquare Interactive
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
We have paid for Splunk support, and we’re not on the free tier hoping for assistance; we are a significant customer and invest a lot in this service.
Senior System Administrator at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I have had nothing but good experiences with Splunk support, receiving timely and helpful replies.
Cyber Security Associate at SAP
We've had great customer success managers who have helped us navigate scaling from 600 gigs to 30 terabytes.
Principal Engineer at Aviatrix
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog scales efficiently across diverse environments, handling increased workloads seamlessly, though costs may rise with extensive usage.
Sentiment score
7.4
Splunk Enterprise Security offers excellent scalability, managing large data volumes and supporting effortless growth across industries.
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
We did, as a trial, engage the AWS integration, and immediately it found all of our AWS resources and presented them to us.
Systems Administrator at Townsquare Interactive
Datadog's scalability is strong; we've continued to significantly grow our software, and there are processes in place to ensure that as new servers, realms, and environments are introduced, we're able to include them all in Datadog without noticing any performance issues.
Senior Custom Software Development Consultant at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
We currently rely on disaster recovery and backup recovery, which takes time to recover, during which you're basically blind, so I'm pushing my leadership team to switch over to a clustering environment for constant availability.
IT Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
It is one of the things that separates it from other tooling, and if not, it is the most scalable solution out there.
Systems Development Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
CTO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliable performance with minimal downtime and quick resolution of occasional data import issues.
Sentiment score
7.5
Splunk Enterprise Security is praised for stability and reliability, despite challenges with resource demands and custom configurations.
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
Full Stack Developer at Townsquare Interactive
Datadog seems to be more stable, and I really want to have a complete demo before making a call to decide on this.
Enterprise solution architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
They test it very thoroughly before release, and our customers have Splunk running for months without issues.
Splunk System Engineer at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees
Splunk has been very reliable and very consistent.
Principal Engineer at Aviatrix
We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Datadog struggles with complex pricing, customization needs, usability, and requires improved integration, training, and cost management for large organizations.
Splunk Enterprise Security needs UI improvements, better integration, richer documentation, competitive pricing, and enhanced AI and threat detection.
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We want to be able to customize the cost part, and we would appreciate more granular access control.
Service Manager at PwC
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
Senior Software Engineer at Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC
Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power.
Resident Consultant (Security Analyst) at helpag
Splunk Enterprise Security is not something that automatically picks things; you have to set up use cases, update data models, and link the right use cases to the right data models for those detections to happen.
Security & Risk Analyst at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
For any future enhancements or features, such as MLTK and SOAR platform integration, we need more visibility, training, and certification for the skilled professionals who are working.
Security Consultant at Matiq
 

Setup Cost

Datadog offers flexible pricing but can become costly with larger infrastructures; users appreciate low setup costs and initial free hosts.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers robust insights but can be costly for high data volumes, challenging affordability for smaller businesses.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Senior Performance and Architecture Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
CTO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The platform requires significant financial investment and resources, making it expensive despite its comprehensive features.
System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration
I find it to be affordable, which is why every industry uses it.
Vice President Research And Development at OSINT Ambition
 

Valuable Features

Datadog excels with real-time monitoring, integrations, intuitive dashboards, and analytics, enhancing observability and operational efficiency in complex environments.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers real-time threat detection, customization, and integration, enhancing security operations and data management capabilities.
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.
Senior Software Engineer at Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
This capability is useful for performance monitoring and issue identification.
Staff Performance Engineer at ServiceNow
I assess Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities for helping to find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior as great.
Splunk System Engineer at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees
Splunk Enterprise Security provides the foundation for unified threat detection, investigation, and response, enabling fast identification of critical issues.
Specialist-Infrastructure Opertions at Allianz Technology
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
374
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.7%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.1%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.1%
Datadog4.7%
Other88.2%
Log Management
 

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.
reviewer1469784 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Helps us detect cyber threats quickly and integrate multiple feeds effectively
Overall, the product is good, but when it comes to some infrastructure issues, we have to dig into more logs. There is no straightforward indication of an issue. Health check kind of dashboards are not available. More AI would help us, and more optimization, since security products run more queries. The AI module could suggest solutions, optimizing queries or workload balancing. If the product itself advises on running queries during peak times, it would be similar to what ChatGPT currently offers. We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy. We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues. Self-monitoring dashboards could be beneficial. The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side. The primary support team has very limited knowledge to provide.
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Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feb 26, 2015
HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. ​McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm
We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise98
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise263
 

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 SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
 

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
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.