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Datadog vs Splunk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 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
6.5
Datadog enhances efficiency by optimizing resources, reducing downtime, and improving incident response, offering significant cost savings and performance benefits.
Sentiment score
7.0
Users experienced increased ROI with Splunk Observability Cloud, citing improved visibility, efficiency, collaboration, and reduced downtime.
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
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.
Using Splunk has saved my organization about 30% of our budget compared to using multiple different monitoring products.
Anyone working in front-end management should recognize the market price to see the true value of end-user monitoring.
I have definitely seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud, particularly through how fast it has grown and how comfortable other teams are in relying on its outputs for monitoring and observability.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog's customer service is praised, though technical support feedback is mixed; expertise and engagement are frequently appreciated.
Sentiment score
7.0
Splunk Observability Cloud support is generally responsive, highly rated, with helpful resources, despite occasional delays in resolution.
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
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.
On a scale of 1 to 10, the customer service and technical support deserve a 10.
They have consistently helped us resolve any issues we've encountered.
They often require multiple questions, with five or six emails to get a response.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog is praised for scalability, easy integration, and reliable performance, but users should monitor costs as usage increases.
Sentiment score
7.4
Splunk Observability Cloud offers scalability and smooth transitions, despite costs and challenges with custom metrics and rapid onboarding.
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
We did, as a trial, engage the AWS integration, and immediately it found all of our AWS resources and presented them to us.
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.
We've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
As we are a growing company transitioning all our applications to the cloud, and with the increasing number of cloud-native applications, Splunk Observability Cloud will help us achieve digital resiliency and reduce our mean time to resolution.
I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliability and stability, with occasional minor issues that are quickly resolved.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Observability Cloud is highly stable with minor issues, rated 8-9/10, and offers reliable customer support.
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
These incidents are related to log service, indexes, and metric capturing issues.
I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.
We rarely have problems accessing the dashboard or the page.
Unlike NetScout or regular agents for APM, RUM has many problems during the POC phase because customer environments vary widely.
 

Room For Improvement

Datadog faces user complaints about performance, pricing, complexity, logging, notifications, integration, AI, cost control, and documentation.
Splunk Observability Cloud needs better integration, user-friendly interfaces, enhanced AI, and simpler customization for improved user experience.
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
In future updates, I would like to see AI features included in Datadog for monitoring AI spend and usage to make the product more versatile and appealing for the customer.
The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders.
The next release of Splunk Observability Cloud should include a feature that makes it so that when looking at charts and dashboards, and also looking at one environment regardless of the product feature that you're in, APM, infrastructure, RUM, the environment that is chosen in the first location when you sign into Splunk Observability Cloud needs to stay persistent all the way through.
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available.
 

Setup Cost

Datadog pricing is high yet reasonable; flexible subscriptions are available, but usage-based costs require careful monitoring.
Splunk Observability Cloud is costly but reasonable compared to competitors; appreciated for capabilities despite concerns over data volume pricing.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
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.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive.
Splunk is a bit expensive since it charges based on the indexing rate of data.
It is expensive, especially when there are other vendors that offer something similar for much cheaper.
It appears to be expensive compared to competitors.
 

Valuable Features

Datadog offers unified data monitoring with extensive integrations, simplifying observability, debugging, analytics, and performance tracking across platforms.
Splunk Observability Cloud excels in log analytics, real-time dashboards, alerting, AI insights, and seamless integration for cloud management.
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.
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.
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.
Splunk provides advanced notifications of roadblocks in the application, which helps us to improve and avoid impacts during high-volume days.
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
206
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
6th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
7th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 7.4%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.0%, up from 1.2% 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 (%)
Datadog7.4%
Splunk Observability Cloud2.0%
Other90.6%
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.
Taiwo Ige - PeerSpot reviewer
Alerting improves incident response across teams and enables faster awareness before customer impact
Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved in terms of integrations with more technical add-ons, such as Zoom. Although they have one with Zoom, it's not available in the cloud, so having that feature would be beneficial. Essentially, Splunk should continue expanding to create easier ways to ingest logs from different products. The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders. However, there are aspects that could be improved, such as linking dashboards to one another. While IT leaders may not drill down, it's crucial to create levels of dashboards for technical users to find root causes, making it effective for stakeholders.
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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
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise94
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

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?
Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

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 Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: October 2025.
872,019 professionals have used our research since 2012.