Chronosphere vs Datadog comparison

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Chronosphere

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

Datadog and Chronosphere compete in cloud monitoring solutions. Datadog appears to have the upper hand with broader feature availability and robust integration options.

Features: Datadog offers comprehensive monitoring, customizable dashboards, and extensive third-party integrations enabling easy monitoring consolidation across services. Chronosphere emphasizes high scalability, efficient data ingestion, and cost efficiency, reducing latency for large-scale data handling.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog has streamlined deployment, extensive documentation, and support services making setup straightforward for cloud environments. Chronosphere meets enterprise needs with tailored deployment options and strong support for complex deployments.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog's tiered pricing structure is perceived as strong value despite higher upfront costs due to feature depth. Chronosphere offers competitive pricing emphasizing low-cost scalability, resulting in favorable ROI for managing vast data volumes.

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

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

October 2025

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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

29th

Ranking in AIOps

17th

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

4th

Ranking in AIOps

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

207

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Chronosphere is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 6.6%, down from 10.1% 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	6.6%
Chronosphere	0.5%
Other	92.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Arvind Pant

Senior Data Engineer at DoorDash, Inc.

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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Dhroov Patel

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.

Read full review

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"

"The integration and configuration are incredibly simple. The SaaS offering is remarkably easy to set up, especially if you're coming from a Graphite environment or anything that uses a StatsD."

"I have found error reporting and log centralization the most valuable features. Overall, Datadog provides a full package solution."

"The dashboards are super convenient to us for a more zoomed out view of what is going on with each integration that we utilize."

"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."

"The solution allows flexibility and heightened observability for presenting data, creating indicators, and setting service-level objectives."

"Datadog has impacted my organization positively as this is our main observability tool when it comes to monitoring services, traces, and all resources within key services."

"The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."

"The solution has helped our organization with custom events to track specific cases."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"It's not easy for everyone."

"I rate Datadog an eight out of ten because the expense of using it keeps it from being a nine or ten."

"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."

"It can have a more modernized pricing mechanism. We're actually working with them to figure out how to become more modular and have a better and more modernized pricing mechanism. The issue with Datadog is that you have to buy the whole suite of different products, and you kind of get stuck in the old utilization of 40% of their suite. Most organizations today break down between application development, networking, and security. Therefore, there should be a way to break down different modules into just app dev, infosec, networking, etc. Customers have various needs across their business lines, and sometimes, they're just not willing to have tools that they're not using 100%. AppDynamics is probably a little bit better in terms of being modular."

"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."

"More pre-configured "Monitor Alerts" would be helpful."

"It's not that straightforward when creating an alert. The syntax is a little confusing."

"Lately, chat support has a longer waiting time."

"Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"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."

"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."

"The tool is open-source."

"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."

"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."

"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."

"The price is better than some competing products."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Retailer

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	80
Midsize Enterprise	46
Large Enterprise	95

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 ...

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

October 2025

Download Chronosphere product report

Download Datadog product report

November 2025

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 integrates extensive monitoring solutions with features like customizable dashboards and real-time alerting, supporting efficient system management. Its seamless integration capabilities with tools like AWS and Slack make it a critical part of cloud infrastructure monitoring.

Datadog offers centralized logging and monitoring, making troubleshooting fast and efficient. It facilitates performance tracking in cloud environments such as AWS and Azure, utilizing tools like EC2 and APM for service management. Custom metrics and alerts improve the ability to respond to issues swiftly, while real-time tools enhance system responsiveness. However, users express the need for improved query performance, a more intuitive UI, and increased integration capabilities. Concerns about the pricing model's complexity have led to calls for greater transparency and control, and additional advanced customization options are sought. Datadog's implementation requires attention to these aspects, with enhanced documentation and onboarding recommended to reduce the learning curve.

What are Datadog's Key Features?

Sharable Dashboards: Facilitate collaboration with customizable, intuitive dashboards.
Extensive Integrations: Seamlessly connects with tools like Slack and AWS to support workflows.
APM and RUM: Provides deep insights into application performance and user interactions.
Real-Time Tools: Enables agile responses to system issues with real-time monitoring.
Unified Tagging and Visualization: Eases management of complex systems with simplified visualization.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Look For?

Efficient Troubleshooting: Centralized logging speeds up the identification and resolution of issues.
Streamlined Workflows: Integrations with popular tools enhance operational efficiency.
Improved Observability: Comprehensive monitoring improves system reliability and performance.
Resource Optimization: Efficient microservices and container management leads to better cloud resource utilization.
Responsive Alerts: Customizable alerts ensure timely identification of critical issues.

In industries like finance and technology, Datadog is implemented for its monitoring capabilities across cloud architectures. Its ability to aggregate logs and provide a unified view enhances reliability in environments demanding high performance. By leveraging real-time insights and integration with platforms like AWS and Azure, organizations in these sectors efficiently manage their cloud infrastructures, ensuring optimal performance and proactive issue resolution.

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