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Datadog vs Grafana Enterprise Stack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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
187
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
25th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.5%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
Gregory Diana - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers very good charting capabilities and capable of automatically generating dashboards, even for a large number of data points
In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party. It's like Node-RED. Node-RED is free, and you can choose an application, but that application depends on the person who's supporting it. If they decide not to support it, then you're stuck. However, I believe that it can't be improved or changed because people have to make money and make a living from it. Nothing will ever be changed. It depends on the software. Same as Windward. Windward just decided it could not support a large number of customers, so it focused on high-income, low-volume clients. Whereas Node-RED has millions of followers and fantastic support, the same as Grafana. Grafana is partly free, but it's your problem. That's how all these companies work. If you're big and you pay a lot of money, they'll pay attention to you.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Even if we don't end up using Datadog, it revealed problems and optimizations to us that weren't obvious before."
"The single pane of glass view with maneuvering between products has helped us to truly understand root causes after incidents."
"It has scaled great. I haven't run into any problems anywhere that I've used it. They have handled everything that we have needed them to."
"The network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention."
"When I reflect on the ways we used to track down issues, I can't imagine how we ever managed before Datadog."
"Datadog's ability to group and visualize the servers and the data makes it relatively easy for the root cause analysis."
"The performance of Datadog is good."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"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."
"Our productivity has improved with its use."
"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
"Compared to other packages, Grafana Enterprise Stack is user-friendly and easy to configure quickly."
"The dashboards are pretty good."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
 

Cons

"​It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
"The product needs a better Datadog agent installation."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"The solution needs to integrate AI tools."
"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."
"The cost does add up quickly, so it can be some effort to justify the necessary outlay to those paying the bills."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"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."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"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."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"​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."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"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."
"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."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"I use the tool's free license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
14%
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?
From an analytics perspective, the integration of AI would be a beneficial improvement for Grafana Enterprise Stack.
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
Our primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack includes monitoring cluster utilization, taking care of impact avoidance, conducting upgrades, ensuring storage memory does not become full, and id...
 

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 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.