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Datadog vs Grafana Enterprise Stack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

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

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)
Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.4%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer820579 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Muralitharan KS - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective data visualization and effortless integration with Kubernetes
Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources. It categorizes signals accurately and is easy to integrate with Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters using Helm charts. It helps administrators put in minimal effort due to its automatic data source collection capabilities.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale."
"The application performance monitoring is pretty good."
"The solution is stable."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great."
"The visibility into our network has allowed for quick diagnosis of failures, identification of underutilized or over-utilized resources, and allowed for cloud cost optimization opportunities."
"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."
"The technology itself is generally very useful and the interface is great."
"The ability to graph actual, live, or on-the-fly activity is valuable; it is an added value to work with Grafana Enterprise Stack and to display results or logs, which are huge in nature, in graphical characters."
"Our productivity has improved with its use."
"It is truly reliable."
"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"The dashboards are pretty good."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
 

Cons

"The product can be improved by allowing the grouping of APIs to add variables. That way, any API with a unique ID could be grouped together."
"We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"The real issue with this product is cost control."
"I would like better navigability across pages."
"We want to reduce having to go to different screens to obtain all the information."
"I find Grafana really hard to configure. It's difficult to build the dashboard, and it's non-intuitive. In my opinion, it's very difficult to work with Grafana."
"The solution should include integration with Power BI."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."
"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"​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."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"I use the tool's free license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Energy/Utilities Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 Grafana Enterprise Stack?
The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance,...
What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I believe there are some areas for improvement in the product. Something that could be better is the time series functionality. If we choose a longer time range, it averages out some of the visibil...
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I am using Grafana Enterprise Stack just for monitoring purposes. The main use case is monitoring, and Grafana Enterprise Stack gives all the historical trends, which makes it easy to understand ho...
 

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
1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,140 professionals have used our research since 2012.