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ControlUp vs Datadog 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
7.2
ControlUp improved ROI through workload monitoring, automation, and preventive measures, enhancing reliability and freeing resources for engineering.
Sentiment score
6.5
Organizations experience significant cost efficiency and improved reliability with better debugging, proactive monitoring, and infrastructure optimization.
This is having a 24/7 junior admin who's really smart, always there, always doing work, but you have to consume his work.
Basically, what we were targeting is the response time of the virtual environment.
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.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
9.0
ControlUp's support sees varied feedback, improving over time; larger clients benefit more, while others experience mixed satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog support is praised for responsiveness and expertise, though some report variability in response time and communication issues.
I was quite happy to work with ControlUp because the support is excellent.
Basically, if I could take everything that you do, put it in a tool, and hand you that tool so you don't have to repeat your efforts, then you would be able to make good use of it.
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
ControlUp offers scalable cloud solutions for multiple sectors, balancing costs and resources with flexible licensing based on machine numbers.
Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog offers excellent scalability and integration, but costs can rise without careful monitoring; users praise its efficiency.
It scales very well; you just have to tell it what you're doing and size it for what you're asking.
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.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
ControlUp is reliable and stable but may face configuration, performance, and email retention issues, with responsive support available.
Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its stability, reliable uptime, minimal disruptions, and quick incident responses, ensuring consistent monitoring.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

ControlUp users seek improved integration, automation, reporting, and interface, with enhanced monitoring, alerting, data export, and scripting capabilities.
Datadog needs improvements in query performance, user interface, integrations, documentation, cost management, mobile features, and alert customization.
There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting.
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.
 

Setup Cost

ControlUp offers annual licenses with tiered pricing, advanced features, potential hidden costs, and influences from platform agreements.
Enterprise users find Datadog's pricing high yet reasonable, with monitoring needed due to usage-based billing and potential cost variability.
It is expensive.
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.
 

Valuable Features

ControlUp enhances performance monitoring with real-time insights, automation, and integration, praised for stability, customization, and responsive support.
Datadog offers insights, monitoring, and alerting with customizable dashboards for efficient issue resolution and enhanced performance optimization.
Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place.
It's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

ControlUp
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
31st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (5th)
Datadog
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
207
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of ControlUp is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 4.8%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog4.8%
ControlUp1.1%
Other94.1%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Jean-CharlesMoriaud - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation capabilities and proactive monitoring have improved infrastructure reliability and reduced troubleshooting time
ControlUp has a lot of automation in it. It detects problems and failures very well. It's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them. That's one of the strong points of ControlUp. All the automations, and there's a large customer-written automation. You can pick up those automations and use them on your environment, and it helps a lot. This is very good. It's not third-party, but it's external routines and automations that you can download from their website and implement on your side. That's one of the strong points of ControlUp. ControlUp, the way we implemented it, and the goal of ControlUp, is to be proactive instead of starting to work on a problem when it already happens. There are a lot of counters and monitors you can implement that will help you detect problems before they happen.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise95
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ControlUp Real-time?
Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive. It is a cheap tool because it is deployed to many devices where I work.
What needs improvement with ControlUp Real-time?
There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting.
What is your primary use case for ControlUp Real-time?
My use cases include everything, and I don't mean that facetiously. I mean everything. We manage the servers, manage user sessions, manage everything. We monitor monitoring and take actual actions,...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
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
Find out what your peers are saying about ControlUp vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
873,209 professionals have used our research since 2012.