Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Datadog vs Grafana Loki 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 Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
203
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 7.9%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana Loki7.9%
Datadog5.7%
Other86.4%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Prakash Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
Has improved monitoring accuracy and enabled faster issue resolution through detailed alerting and transaction visibility
The best feature that Datadog offers is infrastructure monitoring, where it can look at the CPU utilization, different process utilization, all the processes which are running, and alert us in advance if things are going beyond normal threshold. I think everything about the features of Datadog is amazing. Datadog provides details up to the transactions. We can look at the transaction log too for the application, which is really helpful. Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog. It has improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space. We can monitor business transactions and take proactive action. It is really great to take actions on the issues before an end user reports it, which is a great advantage for us.
Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial."
"Monitors have also been very valuable when setting up our on-call processes. It makes it easy to set up and adjust alerting to keep our teams aware of anything going wrong."
"This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space."
"Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier."
"Their interface is probably one of the easiest things to use because it lets non-developers and non-engineers quickly get access to metrics and pull business value out of them. We could put together dashboards and give it to people who are non-technical, then they can see the state of the world."
"Customizable views as well as the ability to "dive in" when we see someting anomalous has improved the workflow for handling incidents."
"It has enhanced the performance of my team."
"The pricing model makes more sense than what we paid for against other competitors."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"There are new features like that pilot code and things like that for profiling."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
 

Cons

"I believe Datadog could be improved because sometimes it's not the most user-friendly, and when monitors have a new metric or a service that no longer needs to be monitored, it remains in the system."
"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
"I like the idea of monitoring on the go yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."
"Deploying the agents is still very manual."
"One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote."
"A tool as powerful as Datadog is, understandably, going to have a bit of a learning curve, especially for new team members who are unfamiliar with the bevy of features it offers."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."
"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."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"​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."
"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."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
870,701 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise93
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise3
 

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 Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
 

Comparisons

 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
870,701 professionals have used our research since 2012.