Datadog vs Elastic Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Mar 30, 2022

We performed a comparison between Datadog and Elastic Security (formerly ELK Logstash) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Most users of Datadog felt the setup and deployment was straightforward, as long as they were familiar with the software. Users of Elastic Security said setup and deployment was easy, but with each additional server, it became more complex.
  • Features: Datadog users felt the software had great integration and error reporting, and that it provided great visibility, which helped proactivity around incident management. But users had a problem with stability and didn’t like that there was not enough monitoring through the dashboard.

    Elastic Security users thought the software was very flexible and scalable but felt the monitor was not mature enough. They also had difficulty retrieving data, and were unhappy that the solution didn’t offer predictive maintenance.
  • Pricing: Users of Datadog found the software expensive and the pricing model confusing. Users of Elastic Security said that licensing was expensive yet competitively priced.
  • Service and Support: Most Datadog users were satisfied with the level of support. On the other hand, Elastic Security users had mixed reviews regarding support; some said that response time took a while.
  • ROI: Users of Datadog had mixed reviews on the ROI; some thought the product was too expensive, which was why they hadn’t seen ROI yet.

Comparison Results: Datadog and Elastic Security have a similar user rating for ease of deployment, and users of both felt that the solutions were expensive. Users felt Elastic Security took too long to respond when it came to service and support. In terms of features, reviewers of Datadog had a problem with stability and felt there wasn’t enough monitoring through their dashboard. Reviewers of Elastic Security said they had difficulty retrieving data and felt the solution should offer predictive maintenance.

To learn more, read our detailed Datadog vs. Elastic Security Report (Updated: March 2023).
686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
Answer: 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 custom built-in metrics gives us a wealth of knowledge and historical data that helps keep our system running smoothly. The pricing with Datadog can be very high. We feel there should be a more tiered approach to give users the opportunity to buy a more tailored product specific to their organizational needs. Datadog could also be more user-friendly. We would like to see deeper application-level insight and better incident management. Using ELK, you can gather authentication information from service providers and determine which identity provider is not performing properly. ELK is very flexible; you can have a number of scenarios and get logs from all of them. ELK is a very cost-effective solution. But it can be a complex solution to use. Better integration with 3rd party APMs would be very helpful. Currently, upgrades with ELK are released as stacks. Plugins or extensions would save removal and reinstallation and make the process move seamlessly. Conclusion We researched both of these solutions and concluded Datadog gave us the best visibility, better integration, and helpful, timely support. The logs and error reporting are extremely useful to conduct analysis and root cause analysis. The setup, ease of use, and flexibility with dashboard creation and reporting are just some of the things that our team liked about Datadog.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"APM and tracing are super useful.""Most of the features in the way Datadog does monitoring are commendable and that is the reason we choose it. We did some comparisons before picking Datadog. Datadog was recommended based on the features provided.""Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams.""We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack.""The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support.""We really like the charts and visualization.""We enjoy the multistep API tests.""Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."

More Datadog Pros →

"The most valuable feature is the search function, which allows me to go directly to the target to see the specific line a customer is searching for.""The most valuable features of the solution are the prevention methods and the incident alerts.""The solution is quite stable. The performance has been good.""Elastic Security allows us to deliver visibility in a few hours, which makes our customers more confident in our service.""We chose the product based on the ability to scan for malware using a malware behavioral model as opposed to just a traditional hash-based antivirus. Therefore, it's not as intensive.""It's open-source and free to use.""The cost is reasonable. It's not overly pricey.""One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is more flexible than AlienVault."

More Elastic Security Pros →

Cons
"Deploying the agents is still very manual.""Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization.""The ease of implementation needs improvement.""I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment.""Datadog could make their use cases more visible either through their docs or tutorial videos.""We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems.""Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs.""I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."

More Datadog Cons →

"We'd like to see some more artificial intelligence capabilities.""With Elastic, you have to build the use cases for the specific requirement. Other products have a simple integration and more use cases to integrate out-of-the-box solutions for SIEM.""Elastic Security has a steep learning curve, so it takes some time to tune it and set it up for your environment. There are some costs associated with logging things that don't have value. So you need to be cautious to only log things that make sense and keep them around for as long as you need. You shouldn't hold onto things just because you think you might need them.""Elastic Security provides a huge amount of searchable data, which is a great advantage in itself but is costly in terms of the number of servers used.""There isn't really a very good user experience. You need a lot of training.""There is room for improvement in the Kibana dashboard and in the asset management for the program.""The price of this product could be improved, especially the additional costs. I would also like to see better-quality graphics.""We are paying dearly for the guy who is working on the ELK Stack. That knowledge is quite rare and hard to come by. For difficulty and availability of resources, I would rate it a five out of 10."

More Elastic Security Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It has a module-based pricing model."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "They prefer monthly subscriptions."
  • "Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
  • "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."
  • "While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
  • "The price is better than some competing products."
  • More Datadog Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The solution is free."
  • "Its price is fine. Its licensing works on a yearly basis. We have to renew the license every year. I also have a good experience with Darktrace. When we buy Darktrace, we get training free of cost, which is not there in Elastic. We have to pay extra for training. There is certainly room for improvement."
  • "I find it better than Splunk in terms of cost-effectiveness. For cost-effectiveness, I would rate it a nine out of 10."
  • "Affordable but with additional costs"
  • "When compared to other products, the price is average or on the low side."
  • "The standard license's features are very similar to the free version, so if you don't need to use Elastic Security as an emergency service, you could go for the free version."
  • "The licensing cost of Elastic Security is based on the daily ingestion rate. I can't recall the exact figure, but for 10GB of log action daily, it would cost around $20,000."
  • More Elastic Security Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    HAPPY BHALLA
    Aji Joseph - PeerSpot reviewerAji Joseph
    Reseller

    It depends on your requirement. If you are looking for a SIEM/log management solution ELK would be a better option. 


    But if you are looking for more of a monitoring solution Datadog would be better. Also, Datadog provides out-of-the-box integrations with a lot of cloud applications. ELK could be cost-effective but a bit challenging to configure & finetune.   

    Shibu Babuchandran - PeerSpot reviewerShibu Babuchandran
    Real User

    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 aggregation
    Clean 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

    reviewer1584621 - PeerSpot reviewerreviewer1584621 (Cyber Security Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees)
    Real User

    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!

    reviewer1352679 - PeerSpot reviewerreviewer1352679 (IT Technical Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees)
    Real User

    Where do you want to spend your money, on people or licenses?


    ELK requires a long-term investment in engineering resources to manage the system and to provide the capability.  


    Datadog provides capabilities for you so you only need some administrators. What are the capabilities?  Some critical ones include availability, scalability, consuming log files, platform upgrades, ...

    If you are consuming smaller data sets (100's of GB) with shorter retention, the size and scaling are much easier making ELK easier.

    Do you have admins or engineers?  If your team doesn't have dedicated time & skills to spend developing solutions like elastic-alert you should look for a vendor to provide capabilities.

    I expect some capabilities in Datadog you will not be able to replicate in ELK....  so that answer makes this obvious.

    We are going to evaluate the same for our org. We do about 10 TB a day consumption in ELK and are looking to see if we can shift $$$ from engineers and infra to SaaS.

    Ovais Reza - PeerSpot reviewerOvais Reza
    Real User

    I have used both ELK and Datadog, and there are lots of variables to consider here. The three important points that I looked at are:


    - Cost. In addition to service costs, you have to consider egress and ingress costs as well.


    - Real-time observability that you need during development vs long-term Observability. Keep in mind, when you export data over the internet, it comes with the same reliability issues as any other service on the internet. Regardless of how Datadog classifies its service as real-time, it is not real-time, IMO. It very much depends on your definition of real-time.


    - Deployment and maintenance complexity. When your ELK cluster grows it has some pain points you need to be aware of.


    My general approach is to deploy ELK for development, tune the data, and then pivot toward commercial solutions if I need to. This gives you insight into your data and what you should be preserving and that way you are not paying high costs, when or if you do decide to take advantage of a commercial solution.

    it_user860751 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user860751 (IT Manager at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees)
    Real User

    Can you tell me what you actually want to do so that I can help you?

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The stability of the solution is good.
    Top Answer:The solution could offer better reporting features.
    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 58 in Log Management
    Views
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    Comparisons
    38,195
    Reviews
    108
    Average Words per Review
    430
    Rating
    8.6
    8th
    out of 58 in Log Management
    Views
    32,924
    Comparisons
    27,571
    Reviews
    21
    Average Words per Review
    452
    Rating
    7.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
    Learn More
    Overview

    Datadog is a cloud monitoring solution that is designed to assist administrators, IT teams, and other members of an organization who are charged with keeping a close eye on their networks. Administrators can use Datadog to set real-time alerts and schedule automated report generation. They can deal with issues as they arise and keep up to date with the overall health of their network while still being able to focus on other tasks. Users can also track the historical performance of their networks and ensure that they operate at the highest possible level.

    Datadog Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying Datadog include:

    • Gain an integrated view of the services and programs that IT teams are employing across their networks. Users can view and monitor all of the disparate programs that they have running across their networks with this one solution. They can track these programs across the entirety of the data’s life cycle.
    • Analyze and utilize massive amounts of data in real time. Datadog’s dashboards gather data in real time. Administrators can utilize their network’s data the minute that it becomes relevant to them. Decisions can be made based on the most current information available.
    • Keep your cloud network secured against digital threats. Datadog enables users to create alerts that will notify the minute that threats arise. IT teams and administrators can rapidly address any issue that comes up and prevent any existing problem from growing worse.
    • Easily get it up and running. Users can set up Datadog, configure it, and employ API integrations to connect it to external solutions with ease.

    Datadog Features

    • Customizable and prefabricated monitoring dashboards. Administrators are supplied with two different types of dashboards that they can choose from when they are setting up Datadog. They can customize the dashboards to fit any specialized monitoring need. Additionally, users can choose to use prefabricated dashboards that come with the solution.
    • Disaster recovery feature. Datadog has a built-in feature that enables organizations to continue functioning if some disaster strikes their network. If the network suffers damage, Datadog can restore lost data and infrastructure. Should a digital threat do damage to the network, Datadog ensures that the damage is not irreparable.
    • Vulnerability scanning tool. Users can keep ahead of threats to their networks by employing Datadog’s vulnerability scanning feature. This tool scans the entirety of a user’s network and warns them if a vulnerability is detected. Users can then move to patch these holes in their security before the threat to their network can escalate.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Datadog is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It can offer organizations many advantages. Two major advantages are the dashboards that users can create and the monitoring capability that it gives system administrators.

    A senior manager in charge of site reliability engineering at Extra Space Storage writes, “The dashboards we created are core indicators of the health of our system, and it is one of the most reliable sources we have turned to, especially as we have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately. We can usually rely on logs to tell us what the apps are doing.”

    Housecall Pro’s senior director of DevOps writes, “We value the monitoring capability since it allows us to be pushed alerts, rather than having to observe graphs continually.

    Unify SIEM, endpoint security, and cloud security
    Elastic Security modernizes security operations — enabling analytics across years of data, automating key processes, and bringing native endpoint security to every host.
    Elastic Security equips teams to prevent, detect, and respond to threats at cloud speed and scale — securing business operations with a unified, open platform.
    Offer
    Learn more about Datadog
    Learn more about Elastic Security
    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Pharma/Biotech Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm44%
    Computer Software Company19%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Healthcare Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government10%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise43%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business54%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    Datadog vs. Elastic Security
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Elastic Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Datadog is ranked 2nd in Log Management with 108 reviews while Elastic Security is ranked 8th in Log Management with 20 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Elastic Security is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Easy to set up and good UI but needs better customization capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Elastic Security writes "Integrates into the overall ELK Stack, scans for vulnerabilities well and offers good performance". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic, Azure Monitor, Splunk Enterprise Security and Zabbix, whereas Elastic Security is most compared with Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, Graylog, Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. See our Datadog vs. Elastic Security report.

    See our list of best Log Management vendors.

    We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.