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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)
40th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (27th)
Datadog
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 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 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog1.9%
BMC Helix Cloud Security0.5%
Other97.6%
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

"The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."
"It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP."
"Role-based security is a valuable feature."
"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."
"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 most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities."
"The dashboards are super convenient to us for a more zoomed out view of what is going on with each integration that we utilize."
"Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users."
"Because of our client focus, it is easy for us to sell. This is because it is easy to use and easy to set up."
"The observability pipelines are the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale."
"We've found it most useful for managing Rstudio Workbench, which has its own logs that would not be picked up via Cloudwatch."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution include log search to help triage specific problems that we get notified about (whether by alerts we have configured or users that have contacted us)."
 

Cons

"BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features."
"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."
"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."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"It seems that admin cost control granularity is an afterthought."
"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
"We primarily use the log management functionality, and the only feedback I have there is better fuzzy text searching in logs (the kind that Kibana has)."
"I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."
"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."
"Logging is not a great experience."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work."
 

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."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"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."
"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"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."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
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: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.