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BMC Helix Cloud Security 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

BMC Helix Cloud Security
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
39th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (26th)
Datadog
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
5th
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), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of BMC Helix Cloud Security is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 2.1%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.1%
BMC Helix Cloud Security0.5%
Other97.4%
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

DG
Portfolio Manager/ Helix Administrator at Frontier Communications
A highly scalable and straightforward solution with a knowledgeable support team
We work on a third-party shared environment. It wouldn’t have been feasible for a smaller company. My company was actually the first one to do it. Just like any cloud security, it pays to do your research and have complimentary security involved. The product can’t be the be-all and end-all tool for your security. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
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

"Using this solution is an eye-opener; having that holistic view is the biggest eye-opener because you understand, from any of your connected cloud accounts, what your vulnerabilities are with it."
"The most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities."
"The best feature is time to value. With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud. If you have Azure and AWS deployments, you might have multiple subscriptions in Azure and usually multiple accounts in AWS. You may even be doing some GCP work (around Google Cloud Platform). It's very difficult to manage a common set of policies, even less reporting, across multiple subscriptions, accounts, and cloud environments. What BMC Helix Cloud Security does is provide a unified view or single pane of glass as to your baseline. Then, it also facilitates the ability for Level 1 or 2 operations support to take action and report on security vulnerabilities."
"It is a good tool to make sure that your containers are safe and sound."
"It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP."
"The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."
"With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud."
"The cool feature of Helix Cloud Security is that you can do all that — understand and remediate issues — in one dashboard, based on the different policies that are available for security, out-of-the-box."
"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."
"Datadog is easy to use and easy to deploy. It's a better solution compared to others on the market in terms of being budget friendly for our customers."
"The two most valuable aspects are the Terraform provider for Datadog and the K8s Orchestrator."
"Datadog's ability to group and visualize the servers and the data makes it relatively easy for the root cause analysis."
"The solution is stable."
"Datadog is easy to use and easy to deploy, and it's a better solution compared to others on the market in terms of being budget friendly for our customers."
"I appreciate that they are constantly adding new features, some of which we haven't yet had a chance to implement."
"It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there."
 

Cons

"We've had some with issues connectors. The connectors have seemed to have caused a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment. The only time I've had to reach out to tech support was for that. It seems it may not have been scanning correctly or I wasn't seeing data within a specific time. But we've set up a couple of connectors in the past couple of weeks and they actually scanned the AWS environment and we had data within about 10 minutes. It's working a lot faster and I think they're making improvements as they go."
"I want the role-based security feature to be improved."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"I think its TOA interfaces are still not that comfortable. The UI could be more user-friendly, easier to use."
"We've had some issues with connectors; the connectors have seemed to cause a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment."
"Every organization out there doesn't rely on just one control body. They use FISMA control. They may use HIPAA, CIS, PCI, or SOX, then blend them. One of the things that is now in big demand for BMC Helix Cloud Security is content. That's the next journey in its lifespan, making it easier for the community to share and collaborate on content for security controls that can be measured and remediated."
"BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features."
"The biggest challenge now, which is a good problem to have, with BMC Helix is content."
"It is hard to educate an entire team. There is a big learning curve."
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
"The query performance could be improved, particularly when handling large datasets, as slower response times can hinder efficiency."
"The correlation between the logs and the metrics needs improvement as most cases, we might use another logging tool (that is cheaper in cost) which we then have to link together."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is based on an annual subscription, upfront, and it's based on cloud assets. Whether your assets are in Azure and AWS combined, the tool tells you how many assets are being scanned and that's the number used for pricing."
"It is a subscription model with term licensing that is usually yearly. This includes, not only the product, but support and maintenance. It is based on cloud assets. Therefore, if you have 100 cloud assets, those cloud assets are measured based on evaluation or transactions. For example, if I'm evaluating that cloud asset for CIS compliance, PCI compliance, and AWS best practices, that asset gets evaluated three times, as those are three transactions. However, the license model is based on peak asset usage. So, over a year, if you deploy 100, 1000, 500, and then 2000 assets, you will be charged for the 2000 peak of assets managed by Helix Cloud Security."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The tool is open-source."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Performing Arts
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Transportation Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera
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 BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.