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Datadog vs Grafana Enterprise Stack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
20th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.8%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.9%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog3.8%
Grafana Enterprise Stack0.9%
Other95.3%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.
RM
Test Lead at Calpine Group
Efficient monitoring and alerting enhance operational insights
With Grafana Enterprise Stack, we can identify issues that New Relic cannot help with. While New Relic requires purchase and supports frontend and backend components, Grafana Enterprise Stack helps identify where issues are occurring. When we need to deep dive into issues, we use New Relic to trace transactions and determine where maximum impact occurs, whether in core size, DB side, or frontend components that slow performance. We first evaluate with Grafana Enterprise Stack, then move to New Relic if we identify performance degradation, such as DB queries taking too much time. Grafana Enterprise Stack responds to queries within 6 to 12 hours. They contact users through email immediately when available. Similarly, New Relic follows the same pattern, responding immediately when requests are raised and resolving issues promptly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Additionally, integrations with, for example, GCP, Network, component, and Software providers are much easier as everything is now centralized."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"If you are monitoring the metrics and insights in your application, and need help monitoring, then this is a great application to look into."
"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to gather complete data instead of looking all over the place at incomplete data and actually make pointed determinations for fixing issues."
"Thanks to frequent concurrent deployments, the DataDog alerts monitors allow us quickly detect issues if anything occurs."
"By combining multiple capabilities or features together, there is full visibility across the technology stacks and we can identify specific bottlenecks or areas where risks and vulnerabilities are likely to exist."
"The service catalog helped improve our organization by giving a good view of the flow for our microservices applications."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"Compared to other packages, Grafana Enterprise Stack is user-friendly and easy to configure quickly."
"The most valuable features of Grafana for data visualization are its ability to create intuitive dashboards and its wide range of visualization options like graphs, charts, and tables."
"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, from 10 AM to 2 PM, we may experience high memory utilization. It helps us to solve these issues."
"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"Our productivity has improved with its use."
"It is very easy to deploy and integrate with any application or infrastructure layer."
 

Cons

"If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely."
"The hardest thing we experience is just training people on what to search for when identifying a problem in Datadog, and having some additional training that might be easily accessible would probably be a benefit."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"Billing should be more transparent."
"The documentation could be improved regarding setting up the agent properly and debugging."
"The monitors can be improved."
"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."
"The solution should include integration with Power BI."
"Grafana Enterprise Stack is complex and not easy or simple."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"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 connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."
"The layout is good, but I think it needs some enhancement based on my experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"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."
"I use the tool's free license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Energy/Utilities Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise100
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
 

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 needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I am trying to think about its advanced alerting features; we do not use it too much for that. We do get it to report through to our help desk system and if a threshold gets broken, then a ticket i...
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I have switched to a different suite, focusing on customer edge solutions that are mostly Fortinet. To manage it, I use Grafana Enterprise Stack and a whole bunch of tools that we wrote ourselves. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Grafana Enterprise Stack?
We use Grafana Enterprise Stack in all of our clients. I rate this product an eight out of ten.
 

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: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.