ControlUp vs Datadog comparison

ControlUp and Datadog are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. ControlUp is ranked #31 with an average rating of 8.0, while Datadog is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. ControlUp holds a 1.1% mindshare in IM, compared to Datadog’s 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ControlUp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Datadog users who would recommend it.

ControlUp

Read 12 ControlUp reviews

2,447 Views
1,272 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Datadog

Read 188 Datadog reviews

24,907 Views
6,476 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

ControlUp

Datadog

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Datadog and ControlUp compete in the monitoring solutions category, focusing on diverse aspects. Datadog appears to have the upper hand in cloud integration and real-time insights, while ControlUp excels in VDI and virtual environments.

Features: Datadog is renowned for its extensive integrations, intuitive interface for creating monitors, and rich dashboards. Its hosted nature requires no infrastructure management. ControlUp offers robust monitoring with a particular strength in virtual desktop infrastructure and granular insights into resource usage.

Room for Improvement: Datadog users seek enhanced query capabilities, better pricing transparency, and simplified setup. Users also desire improved AI integration and advanced logging. ControlUp could improve network infrastructure monitoring, reporting, and automation, in addition to enhancing the user interface to minimize information overload.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog excels in cloud deployment, particularly in public clouds, and has supportive, albeit occasionally delayed, customer service. ControlUp provides exceptional service and quick response times, even during off-hours, and performs well in hybrid and on-premises setups.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog’s usage-based pricing model can escalate costs if not managed well, although its feature-rich offering justifies the investment. ControlUp is competitively priced, particularly when bundled with VMware solutions, offering significant value in VDI-focused environments.

To learn more, read our detailed ControlUp vs. Datadog Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ControlUp vs. Datadog

July 2025

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Helped 867,341 peers since 2012

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

ControlUp

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

31st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)

Datadog

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

188

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of ControlUp is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 5.2%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Datadog	5.2%
ControlUp	1.1%
Other	93.7%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Richasvi Tripathi

Solutions Developer at HCL Technologies

Used to monitor several devices, but most reports do not give information of all the devices

We have approximately 10 to 20 feature requests pending on the vendor side. Most reports give information about the top 100 devices, but not all of the devices. In our case, we are monitoring 200000 devices. So, we need details for all those devices, but that is limited to 100, which they have improved to an extent in some reports. I'm thinking of one feature request for ISPs because the dashboard does not provide a detailed list of ISPs, and it provides the wrong list. I feel some firewall issues are blocking that, and the team cannot send that detail. That may be the case. One feature request pending on the vendor side is the data format change. Once you see a detail in the report, it is mentioned in some other format, which is hard to analyze sometimes.

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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

"Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service."

"ControlUp is beneficial as it provides a web interface through which you can access all your infrastructure—servers, devices, and VDI infrastructure—all on the same platform. It supports gathering all infrastructure components in a single, unified dashboard. This helps you identify performance issues or high resource utilization, allowing quick troubleshooting. I appreciate the solid interface that ControlUp offers."

"It shows you so many details of what's going on in that log-on that, if there's a problem, you can identify it in five minutes."

"The visual look of the interface is very easy to understand what is happening and somewhat why it's happening."

"It has a great career time monitoring tool."

"When using ControlUp, the core feature that we have found valuable is its UI. It is a valuable tool to view the analysis reactions of a base core Level 2 or Level 1 team so that they can complete the necessary troubleshooting."

"The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities."

"Integration with Netscaler and Scoutbees can provide a proper end-to-end analysis of the user's experience and give us a real ROI."

More ControlUp pros

"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."

"Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The setup cost was minimal."

"The tools are powerful and intuitive to set up."

"The performance of Datadog is good."

"The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards."

"We really like the charts and visualization."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"This solution be improved by including load throttling tools. For example, I can identify a service where we spend a lot of CPU but I cannot restrict the service from ControlUp. I have to use another tool like AppSense."

"It can be improved by including script-based scheduling."

"Solve is a quick and intuitive tool for quickly mapping data together, however, once you have the view of the data that you like, it is difficult to share this with colleagues."

"The graphical user interface needs to be improved from version to version."

"There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting."

"ControlUp could improve the integration. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring has better integration."

"Most reports give information about the top 100 devices, but not all of the devices."

"Something I would love to see from a partner perspective would be maybe a way to do this in a surface hosting provider."

More ControlUp cons

"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."

"Logging is not a great experience."

"It would also be nice if we had more insight into our own usage of Datadog (agents and custom metrics). They provide a usage page which does help, but it is not in real-time."

"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."

"They should continue expanding and integrating with more third-party apps."

"There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields."

"Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites."

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

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive."

"Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios."

"We are satisfied with the price compared to other solutions."

"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."

"The tool is open-source."

"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."

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."

"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."

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."

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

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

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Healthcare Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

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

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ControlUp Real-time?

Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive. It is a cheap tool because it is deployed to many devices where I work.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ControlUp Real-time?

There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ControlUp Real-time?

My use cases include everything, and I don't mean that facetiously. I mean everything. We manage the servers, manage user sessions, manage everything. We monitor monitoring and take actual actions,...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Nexthink vs ControlUp

Compared 25% of the time

Citrix uberAgent Monitoring vs ControlUp

Compared 22% of the time

Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) vs ControlUp

Compared 8% of the time

SysTrack vs ControlUp

Compared 7% of the time

More ControlUp Competitors

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 12% 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

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ControlUp

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Datadog

September 2025

Download Datadog product report

Overview

ControlUp is a digital experience monitoring management platform that makes it possible for IT teams to deliver a work-from-anywhere experience for employees. The solution makes fixing and preventing issues easy, enabling IT teams to make smarter decisions. It also provides monitoring performance, availability, and useful productivity metrics.

The ControlUp platform supports:

Any digital workstyle
Physical endpoints
Virtual desktops
Apps
SaaS
Web apps
Unified communications tools

ControlUp Features

ControlUp has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Out-of-the-box device and performance metrics
Custom metric and device data collection
Non-intrusive, secure agents with offline mode
Custom reporting
Easy-to-use dashboards
Scalable SaaS infrastructure
Built-in troubleshooting & remediation actions
Remote assist
Custom script actions
Multiple scripting languages
Automation and alerting

ControlUp Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing ControlUp. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Wide range of platform options: ControlUp offers multiple platform options including Windows, macOS, Linux, and IGE, independent of device location.

Powerful analytics: With ControlUp, you can analyze across your entire infrastructure or you can collect detailed individual device performance.

Optimizes performance: The solution enables you to remediate issues and optimize performance with its support of both manual and automated actions.

Minimize user downtime: ControlUp helps you catch common issues that lead to workflow interruptions. Self-correcting capabilities and comprehensive early-warning systems address issues before they impact employee productivity.

Resolve issues faster: The solution enables you to spend less time on support calls and more time driving value via its real-time troubleshooting and remediation solutions.

Increased visibility of remote environments: Gain real-time visibility across your entire network and find new ways to deliver the best end-user experience possible.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the ControlUp solution.

A Chair, IEEE Consumer Technology Society - Dallas,Texas, USA at a non-profit says, “In terms of the public cloud, ControlUp's features make us feel very secure. Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service. ControlUp offers a return-on-investment type of approach that helps us.”

A VP Virtualisation and Citrix Engineer at BlackRock mentions, “Solve is quickly becoming one of the most-used features. Its interface allows us to connect to all 54,000 monitored endpoints in real-time. The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities. Combined with the triggers, we have been growing their usage to fix things before they become an issue. Lastly, the controller view allows us to compare the configurations of settings side-by-side which is extremely helpful when tracking down the RCA of an issue.”

A Senior Citrix Remote Access Engineer at Rabobank comments, “The high-level view of the estate coupled with powerful administration tools has been great. We can see real-time performance and trends and can create triggers for common issues with associated scripts that can automate a lot of the previous manual remediation steps.”

ControlUp

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.

Datadog

Sample Customers

B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida

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

Buyer's Guide

ControlUp vs. Datadog

July 2025

Free Report: ControlUp vs. Datadog

Find out what your peers are saying about ControlUp vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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