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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
3rd
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 (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
13th
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 October 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.0%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog5.0%
Grafana Enterprise Stack1.2%
Other93.8%
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.
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

"Datadog infrastructure monitoring has helped us identify health issues with our virtual machines, such as high load, CPU, and disk usage, as well as monitoring uptime and alerting when Kubernetes containers have a bad time staying up."
"The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."
"Datadog provides tracing and logging, whereas Dynatrace focuses on tracing, and Splunk is more of a logging tool. Datadog's advantage is that we don't need two tools."
"The selection of monitors is a big feature I have been working with."
"We like the distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging. This has been invaluable for us during periods of high traffic or red alert conditions."
"Datadog agents act as an integration to different services, providing easy access and management."
"APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
"We have a better grasp of what is occurring during the deployment cycle. If something fails, we have an idea what has failed, where it has failed, and how it failed to better mitigate the situation."
"It is truly reliable."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"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 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."
"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."
 

Cons

"A big problem with Datadog is the billing. They need to make the billing more user-friendly."
"The logging could be improved in the future."
"The wide range of products Datadog now offers can be a bit intimidating to developers."
"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."
"The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users."
"While the tool is robust with many different capabilities, users would greatly benefit from more examples in the documentation."
"I like the idea of monitoring on the go yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."
"Their security features could be improved. We looked at their Security Monitoring feature but it was early in its development. Datadog are just getting into the security space so I'm sure this will improve in the future."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved. Currently, one needs to ingest labels and timestamps for them to be connected, however, drilling down sometimes takes time."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"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."
"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."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"​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."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"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%
Retailer
6%
Energy/Utilities Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise82
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
 

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?
The layout is good, but I think it needs some enhancement based on my experience. I might not have gotten deeper to understand more details, but I believe it needs more improvement. Scalability and...
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I have been working for several months with Icinga, but after that, I moved forward to Zabbix, and now I might switch to Grafana Enterprise Stack. I am trying many alternatives to provide monitorin...
 

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: September 2025.
869,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.