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Datadog vs Grafana Loki 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 Log Management
3rd
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), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.9%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.7%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

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.
Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The service catalog helped improve our organization by giving a good view of the flow for our microservices applications."
"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"Being able to filter requests by latency is invaluable, as it provides immediate insight into which endpoints require further analysis and optimization."
"We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents."
"Our primary alerts, based on metrics and synthetic transactions, are the most used and relied upon for decreased MTTA/MTTR across all of our platforms. This is followed by deep log analysis that enables us to quickly and easily get to a preliminary root cause that someone on the infrastructure, platform or development teams can take and focus their attention on the precise target that Datadog revealed as the issue to be remediated."
"I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"The product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
 

Cons

"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
"Datadog has a lot of documentation, but a lot of that documentation assumes you know how the service works, which can lead to confusion."
"In production, we intend to use trace IDs generated by RUM to attach to support tickets when a user experiences a traceable network error, and we want to display this trace ID to the user so if they were to contact us about a specific issue, they can provide us an exact ID displayed to them back to us. Currently, this is not possible out-of-the-box client-side without inventing our own solution for capturing these trace IDs, such as shimming the native fetch or returning the ID from the service response."
"The product is quite complex, and there are so many features that I either didn't know about or wasn't sure how to use."
"In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made."
"The monitors can be improved."
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"I would rate Grafana Loki a seven out of ten because it is open source, and sometimes there can be problems that are difficult to fix without official support."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"We had a well-structured dashboard with a functional query. However, an issue arose when the Kubernetes pod restarted. The statistics from our Grafana query would reset, dropping to zero and starting anew. This was particularly noticeable with linear graphs, which are expected to show consistent growth."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is budget friendly."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"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."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"We use a free version."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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 Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
We use the open-source version of Loki. The cloud version is competitively priced compared to other market solutions.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers.
 

Comparisons

 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.