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Datadog vs Grafana Loki 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 Log Management
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), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
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 August 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 6.0%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.4%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog6.0%
Grafana Loki8.4%
Other85.6%
Log Management
 

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.
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 single pane of glass view with maneuvering between products has helped us to truly understand root causes after incidents."
"It helps us better manage our logs."
"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"Monitors have also been very valuable when setting up our on-call processes. It makes it easy to set up and adjust alerting to keep our teams aware of anything going wrong."
"The intuitive user interface has been one of the most valuable features for us."
"The best way it has helped us is by consolidating all our logs into a single place and making it easier to find errors."
"It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it."
"Datadog has clear dashboards and good documentation."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"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 tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
 

Cons

"I would like the tooling to have better integration in Slack, specifically sending out reminders to the relevant people to take breaks, do a retrospective, and specify with emojis which messages to log."
"At times, it can be hard to generate metrics out of logs."
"The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person."
"The cost is pretty high."
"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."
"I sometimes log in and see items changed, either in the UI or a feature enabled. To see it for the first time without proper communication can sometimes come as a shock."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
"Ingesting data from various sources to monitor the log metrics of the system can always improve so that, if something goes wrong, the right teams are alerted."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"The product must improve its UI."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"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 pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"We use a free version."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"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
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise82
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise3
 

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?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
 

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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