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Datadog vs Elastic Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.6
Datadog enhances debugging efficiency, reduces downtime, and optimizes performance, though early ROI quantification can be challenging.
Sentiment score
5.9
Elastic Security is cost-effective, offers significant financial benefits, and is community-friendly, though premium support receives some criticism.
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
I believe features that would provide a lot of time savings, just enabling you to really narrow down and filter the type of frustration or user interaction that you're looking for.
It does not require hefty security budgets and can be deployed for enterprise security effectively.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Datadog's customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, offering efficient support, though regional wait times can vary.
Sentiment score
6.4
Feedback on Elastic Security support is mixed, with community resources praised but technical support often inconsistent and improved communication needed.
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
Support is prompt and helpful.
Most of the time when my team encounters issues, they receive responses within 24 hours.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog is highly scalable, integrates well with cloud services, but costs can rise with full data indexing.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Security scales effectively across business sizes, though infrastructure, licensing, and resource management adjustments may be necessary.
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
We did, as a trial, engage the AWS integration, and immediately it found all of our AWS resources and presented them to us.
Datadog's scalability is strong; we've continued to significantly grow our software, and there are processes in place to ensure that as new servers, realms, and environments are introduced, we're able to include them all in Datadog without noticing any performance issues.
It allows us to think about specific use cases, such as gathering malicious IPs in a single view and analyzing threats based on geolocation.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is reliable and stable, offering consistent monitoring with minimal downtime despite occasional minor issues.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Security is stable and reliable, but big data challenges require proper configuration for optimal performance and care during upgrades.
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
These incidents are related to log service, indexes, and metric capturing issues.
In terms of stability, I would rate Elastic a solid eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest improving Datadog's performance, interface, pricing transparency, documentation, integration, real-time visibility, error traceability, support, and customization.
Users seek better authentication, automation, machine learning, intuitive design, scalability, integration, training resources, and pricing transparency in Elastic Security.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
In future updates, I would like to see AI features included in Datadog for monitoring AI spend and usage to make the product more versatile and appealing for the customer.
The AI aspect would be great where we would not need to go and look at different transactions or different modules of Datadog, as AI can actually provide the data to us on Datadog UI.
CrowdStrike and Defender have more established threat intelligence integration due to having a larger client base.
My security testing team continuously reports vulnerabilities, and we have to fix and update the versions frequently.
Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup.
 

Setup Cost

Datadog offers flexible pricing with reasonable costs, though complexity and fluctuating bills require careful monitoring and enterprise negotiation.
Elastic Security offers a competitive pricing model with a free core version, suitable for small to medium enterprises.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive.
The pricing is reasonable, especially for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), making it a viable option for businesses building their security infrastructure.
This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels.
 

Valuable Features

Datadog excels with its intuitive interface, real-time monitoring, extensive integrations, customizable dashboards, and seamless system operations.
Elastic Security impresses with indexing, visualization, search, AI, scalability, open-source nature, and free, customizable dashboards.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT.
We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data.
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
203
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
11th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (17th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog5.7%
Elastic Security2.9%
Other91.4%
Log Management
 

Q&A Highlights

HB
Sep 29, 2022
 

Featured Reviews

Prakash Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
Has improved monitoring accuracy and enabled faster issue resolution through detailed alerting and transaction visibility
The best feature that Datadog offers is infrastructure monitoring, where it can look at the CPU utilization, different process utilization, all the processes which are running, and alert us in advance if things are going beyond normal threshold. I think everything about the features of Datadog is amazing. Datadog provides details up to the transactions. We can look at the transaction log too for the application, which is really helpful. Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog. It has improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space. We can monitor business transactions and take proactive action. It is really great to take actions on the issues before an end user reports it, which is a great advantage for us.
SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.
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Answers from the Community

HB
Sep 29, 2022
Sep 29, 2022
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 core indicators of the health of our system. You can build very useful dashboards right out of the box using this solution. Our developers are able to see how code is running in production, and having ...
2 out of 7 answers
reviewer1584621 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 21, 2021
Dear, Unfortunately, I can't say much about Datadog but I have used ELK for a short period.  And I can tell you not everything works the way it should. For example, I noticed heavy CPU usage for a Windows client on MS AD servers. I advise you to consider this if it's important to you. Good luck!
Shibu Babuchandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 22, 2021
Datadog: Unify logs, metrics, and traces from across your distributed infrastructure. Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog! Datadog features offered are:200+ turn-key integrations for data aggregationClean graphs of StatsD and other integrations Elasticsearch: Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack). Elasticsearch provides the following key features:Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.Multi Tenant with Multi Types.Various set of APIs including RESTful
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise94
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
What needs improvement with Elastic Security?
The features that require some improvement in Elastic Security might be related to installation. Installation is a little bit overwhelming, so improvements on the installation site could make it ea...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Elastic Security and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
871,358 professionals have used our research since 2012.