We performed a comparison between Datadog and Grafana based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog offers impressive capabilities in dashboards, error reporting, ease of use, logs, and analysis, user-friendliness for development teams, and infrastructure monitoring. Grafana shines in creating visually appealing graphs, customization options, open-source nature, extensive visualization capabilities, import/export functionality, and capacity planning. Datadog has several areas for improvement including usability, integration, user interface intuitiveness, security features, organizational structure management, agent deployment, network monitoring, customization possibilities, and improved documentation for agent setup and debugging. Grafana could improve in data aggregation enhancement, expanding reporting types, logs integration for debugging, editing tool improvement, plugin capabilities expansion, and file-saving configuration improvement.
Service and Support: The opinions on Datadog's customer service are divided, as some users appreciate the quick and useful support, while others faced delays or unhelpful responses. Grafana's customer service has garnered positive feedback for being efficient and technically knowledgeable. Additionally, Grafana offers a valuable community forum for further assistance.
Ease of Deployment: Users generally find the initial setup for Datadog to be simple and uncomplicated, often with assistance from service providers or technical support. On the other hand, the initial setup for Grafana is mixed among users, as some find it easy while others report the need for resource optimization and tuning.
Pricing: Users express differing opinions on the pricing of Datadog, with some considering it expensive and others finding it reasonable compared to alternative solutions. Grafana provides a variety of choices, including a free open-source version, and offers moderately priced licensed options.
ROI: Users have different experiences with the ROI of Datadog, with some mentioned benefits such as time savings and reduced blind spots. On the other hand, Grafana is highly regarded for its data visualization and analytics capabilities.
Comparison Results: Grafana is the favored option when comparing it to Datadog. Users appreciate Grafana's customizable features, extensive visualization capabilities, and ability to create visually appealing graphs. The fact that Grafana is open source and cost-effective, with a supportive community, is also highly valued. Additionally, users find Grafana easy to use, with a friendly interface and helpful customer and technical support. Grafana's focus on data visualization and affordability makes it the preferred choice.
"The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."
"Datadog is constantly adding new features."
"They have a very good foundation in capturing metrics, logs, and traces. It's a very nice tool for that and it allows you to apply these monitoring tools in almost any technology."
"We enjoy the multistep API tests."
"We have found that we're able to get in and out of troubleshooting issues much more rapidly, which in turn, of course, enables us to spend more time on our products."
"The ability to send notifications based on metadata from the monitor is helpful."
"By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore."
"It has a nice UI."
"Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services."
"Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature."
"Grafana's best features are live monitoring and alerts."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"All solutions have some area to improve, and in Datadog they can improve their overall technology moving forward."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews while Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Grafana is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and OpsRamp, whereas Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and ITRS Geneos. See our Datadog vs. Grafana report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability 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.