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Actional vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

Actional
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
71st
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
SOA Governance (5th)
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
210
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Actional is 0.5%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 4.7%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.7%
Actional0.5%
Other94.8%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

it_user690762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud Effortless scaling Never throws away data Takes action now Delivers analytics at the speed of business Automates and speeds up system discovery I would like to see better marketing. We have used this for four years. There are no deployment issues at this…
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This tool has great scaling capabilities, i.e., no limitations."
"From a testing standpoint, ignoring license and cost issues, it's not a bad product."
"It provides more cloud data. They tend to just get the way a service would be designed on the cloud."
"The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards."
"Metric graphing and Dashboards are the most valuable features because they give us good observability into our system and work well to alert us when interesting things happen."
"The ease of graph building is nice, and MUCH easier than Prometheus."
"Datadog's ability to group and visualize the servers and the data makes it relatively easy for the root cause analysis."
"Session recordings have been the most valuable to me as it helps me gain insights into user behaviour at scale."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the APM."
"While my team is relatively new to Datadog, I already see immense value in switching over to Datadog as the primary APM and NPM tool."
 

Cons

"My concern is with Automation integration."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"Support via tickets is absolutely terrible. It's the one obvious bad spot for Datadog."
"We would like to see some versioning system for the Synthetic Tests so that we could have a backup of our tests since they are time-consuming to make and very easy to damage in a moment of error."
"They need to implement template variables into the message response body."
"They could enhance the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third-party solution integration."
"I'm not sure what kind of features are in the roadmap right now, but I encourage the development of features for defining your organization, and allowing the visibility of what kind of metrics you can get. Those features would be really useful for us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"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."
"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."
"​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."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise100
 

Questions from the Community

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Any advice about APM solutions?
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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

Proximus, Air France-KLM, Barratt Developments, Freedom Mortgage
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 Actional vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.