Chronosphere vs Datadog comparison

Read 188 Datadog reviews

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17,166 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Chronosphere

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Datadog and Chronosphere compete in observability and monitoring. Chronosphere appears to have an edge due to its scalability and cost-efficiency despite Datadog's extensive support and diverse features.

Features:Datadog offers a vast range of integrations, advanced dashboards for real-time observability, and comprehensive alerts. Chronosphere optimizes for high-scale monitoring with efficient data compression, agile performance metrics, and effective data storage.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Datadog provides an easy setup with extensive documentation, along with strong customer service for deployment support. Chronosphere features a streamlined deployment ideal for cloud-native environments, with knowledgeable customer service for scalability issues.

Pricing and ROI:Datadog has a flexible pricing model that adapts to business needs, offering a notable ROI through its diverse features. Chronosphere offers a simple pricing structure, aiming for higher ROI via reduced data storage costs and efficient resource utilization.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: August 2025).

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

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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

Chronosphere

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

33rd

Ranking in Log Management

30th

Ranking in AIOps

16th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Ranking in Log Management

3rd

Ranking in AIOps

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

188

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Chronosphere is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 8.5%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Datadog	8.5%
Chronosphere	0.4%
Other	91.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Arvind Pant

Senior Data Engineer at DoorDash

Monitors pipelines with real-time alerts and good documentation

It isn't very easy. It's not easy for everyone. It would be much easier if there could be a simpler version, like a data number version or an SQL version. It's hard to debug if you don't know the syntax. Also, I saw the Slack alerts feature, which is pretty cool, but I cannot customize my messages on the Slack alerts. It would be great if it were possible to tag people in the alerts. At DoorDash, we have hundreds of pipelines, and if something fails, I want to tag specific people so they can start working on the issue immediately.

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reviewer820579

Senior Product Manager at Redfin Corp

Single pane of glass, easy to share dashboards, and good for monitoring

We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks. I wish there was a global setting that lets an admin restrict which regions DD is turned on in as a default setup step. Sometimes, the APM service dashboard link isn't sharable. I click something in the service catalog, and on that service's APM default view, I try to share a link to that with a teammate, and they reach a blank or error screen. I wish there was more organization and detail in the suggestions when I use the query editor. I'm never quite sure when the autofill dropdown shows up if I'm seeing some custom tag or some default property, so I have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to build a chart. It's hard to navigate and explore using the query autofill suggestions without knowing exactly what tag to look for. It's been a bit hard to understand how data gets sampled or how many data points a particular dashboard value is using. We've had questions over the RUM metrics that we see and we had to ask for help with how values are calculated, bin sizes, etc to get confidence in our data.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerting features are good"

"Log analytics give us a powerful mechanism for error tracking, research, and analysis."

"We have hundreds of microservices, and knowing how top-level requests weave throughout all of them is invaluable."

"The observability on offer is the most useful aspect of the product."

"The most valuable features of Datadog are the flexibility and additional features when compared to other solutions, such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Some of the features include AI and ML capabilities and cloud and analysis monitoring"

"Profiling has been made easier."

"By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore."

"The performance of Datadog is good."

"I really enjoy the RUM monitoring features of Datadog. It allows us to monitor user behavior in a way we couldn't before."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"It's not easy for everyone."

"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."

"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."

"They need to implement template variables into the message response body."

"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."

"The solution needs to integrate AI tools."

"Stability of the product has been a concern for us outside of the primary monitoring agents."

"It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."

"ECS could be improved by including more tutorials for beginners to reduce the barriers to entry."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"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."

"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."

"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."

"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."

"It has a module-based pricing model."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Retailer

18%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	78
Midsize Enterprise	42
Large Enterprise	82

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Chronosphere?

What is your primary use case for Chronosphere?

I work as a data engineer, and we have many streaming pipelines. We use Chronosphere to monitor various metrics, such as how much data our pipeline is processing in each batch, the volume of incomi...

What advice do you have for others considering Chronosphere?

If you want to monitor pipelines and use something like Kafka or any streaming platform, Chronosphere is the best option for monitoring pipelines with real-time alerts. It is loosely coupled with y...

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 ...

Splunk Observability Cloud vs Chronosphere

Comparisons

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Honeycomb Enterprise vs Chronosphere

Compared 19% of the time

Grafana vs Chronosphere

Compared 18% of the time

Dynatrace vs Chronosphere

Compared 8% of the time

New Relic vs Chronosphere

Compared 6% of the time

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Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 9% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Chronosphere product report

Download Datadog product report

Overview

Chronosphere provides a robust platform for managing and monitoring cloud-native applications with features like real-time observability, incident management, and capacity planning. It offers scalable, detailed observability across complex systems, an intuitive interface, and cost-efficient resource management. Users report enhanced productivity, improved collaboration, and better decision-making, bolstering operational capabilities and organizational growth.

Chronosphere

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability