Datadog vs Instana Dynamic APM comparison

Datadog and Instana are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Datadog is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7, while Instana is ranked #23 with an average rating of 7.8. Datadog holds a 7.4% mindshare in APM, compared to Instana’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Datadog users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 84% of Instana users who would recommend it.

Datadog

Read 203 Datadog reviews

23,433 Views
14,528 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Instana Dynamic APM

Read 14 Instana Dynamic APM reviews

1,912 Views
1,836 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

Datadog

Instana Dynamic APM

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

Datadog and Instana Dynamic APM are two significant competitors in the application performance monitoring category. Datadog holds an advantage due to its extensive integration capabilities and impressive alerting system, while Instana stands out for its cost-effectiveness, especially for smaller companies.

Features: Datadog provides a hosted solution that eliminates the need for infrastructure management, with key features including sharable dashboards, Slack integration, and anomaly detection. Instana's strengths lie in its comprehensive auto-instrumentation and second-by-second real-time data generation.

Room for Improvement: Datadog can improve by simplifying its pricing model and enhancing error traceability and logging capabilities. Instana requires improvements in API monitoring, user experience tools, and more sophisticated monitoring alerts.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog offers various deployment options in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, with responsive customer service, though beginners may find its complexity challenging. Instana supports hybrid setups with commendable support, providing competitive service response times.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog's pricing is complex but justifiable for feature-rich offerings, while showing variable ROI. Instana's pricing is more affordable compared to competitors, making it an attractive option for SMEs.

To learn more, read our detailed Datadog vs. Instana Dynamic APM Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Datadog vs. Instana Dynamic APM

September 2025

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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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

203

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)

Instana Dynamic APM

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

23rd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 7.4%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Datadog	7.4%
Instana Dynamic APM	1.0%
Other	91.6%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Prakash Pandey

IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance

Has improved monitoring accuracy and enabled faster issue resolution through detailed alerting and transaction visibility

The best feature that Datadog offers is infrastructure monitoring, where it can look at the CPU utilization, different process utilization, all the processes which are running, and alert us in advance if things are going beyond normal threshold. I think everything about the features of Datadog is amazing. Datadog provides details up to the transactions. We can look at the transaction log too for the application, which is really helpful. Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog. It has improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space. We can monitor business transactions and take proactive action. It is really great to take actions on the issues before an end user reports it, which is a great advantage for us.

Read full review

Muhammad Jawwad Hassan

IT Consultant at Arcana Info

A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand

Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers. We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The pricing model makes more sense than what we paid for against other competitors."

"The most valuable features have been: Sharable dashboards, TimeBoards, dogstatsd API, Slack Integration, Event logging API. CloudTrail Events, Tags, alerts, and anomaly detection. EBS Volume Snapshot Age, which they added upon request."

"Datadog has had a significant positive impact on our organization overall, particularly in visibility, reliability, and cost efficiency, allowing us to centralize metrics, logs, and traces across our cloud, moving from reactive to proactive monitoring, with improvements including faster incident detection and resolution, enhanced service reliability, better cost and resource optimization, and shared dashboards providing the engineering and product teams a single source of truth for system health and performance, thus enhancing our overall observability and operational efficiency."

"Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams."

"Customizable views as well as the ability to "dive in" when we see someting anomalous has improved the workflow for handling incidents."

"Integrating Datadog with other platforms has made our monitoring processes a bit easier. It's not super simple, but it's manageable."

"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."

"Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most."

More Datadog pros

"It's great for monitoring services and applications."

"The detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable. In case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out. We can drill down to the application and figure out what's going on and where the issue is."

"It is a stable solution."

"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."

"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."

"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."

"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."

"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."

More Instana Dynamic APM pros

Cons

"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."

"I believe Datadog could be improved because sometimes it's not the most user-friendly, and when monitors have a new metric or a service that no longer needs to be monitored, it remains in the system."

"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."

"The installation is easy for me. However, if you are new to this solution it might not be so easy."

"Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks elegance, efficiency, and complexity."

"The documentation could be improved regarding setting up the agent properly and debugging."

"One area where the product could be improved is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)."

"The FinOps needs improvement."

More Datadog cons

"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."

"Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring."

"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."

"Many managers, as well as our customers, used to ask for reports, such as "top X number of queries that are slow," or "top pages that have the highest number of issues." This is something that can be improved by Instana. Currently, they don't have that kind of reporting available out-of-the-box."

"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."

"The auto-remediation features must be improved."

"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."

"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."

More Instana Dynamic APM cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."

"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."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

"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."

"This solution is budget friendly."

"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."

"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."

"Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."

"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."

"Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."

"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."

"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Transportation Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	80
Midsize Enterprise	46
Large Enterprise	93

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	5

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Instana Dynamic APM?

The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Instana Dynamic APM?

I rate the pricing a seven out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the product.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?

Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Dynatrace vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 45% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 13% of the time

New Relic vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 6% of the time

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 5% of the time

More Instana Dynamic APM Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Datadog

October 2025

Download Datadog product report

Buyer's Guide

Instana Dynamic APM

October 2025

Download Instana Dynamic APM product report

Overview

Datadog integrates extensive monitoring solutions with features like customizable dashboards and real-time alerting, supporting efficient system management. Its seamless integration capabilities with tools like AWS and Slack make it a critical part of cloud infrastructure monitoring.

Datadog offers centralized logging and monitoring, making troubleshooting fast and efficient. It facilitates performance tracking in cloud environments such as AWS and Azure, utilizing tools like EC2 and APM for service management. Custom metrics and alerts improve the ability to respond to issues swiftly, while real-time tools enhance system responsiveness. However, users express the need for improved query performance, a more intuitive UI, and increased integration capabilities. Concerns about the pricing model's complexity have led to calls for greater transparency and control, and additional advanced customization options are sought. Datadog's implementation requires attention to these aspects, with enhanced documentation and onboarding recommended to reduce the learning curve.

What are Datadog's Key Features?

Sharable Dashboards: Facilitate collaboration with customizable, intuitive dashboards.
Extensive Integrations: Seamlessly connects with tools like Slack and AWS to support workflows.
APM and RUM: Provides deep insights into application performance and user interactions.
Real-Time Tools: Enables agile responses to system issues with real-time monitoring.
Unified Tagging and Visualization: Eases management of complex systems with simplified visualization.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Look For?

Efficient Troubleshooting: Centralized logging speeds up the identification and resolution of issues.
Streamlined Workflows: Integrations with popular tools enhance operational efficiency.
Improved Observability: Comprehensive monitoring improves system reliability and performance.
Resource Optimization: Efficient microservices and container management leads to better cloud resource utilization.
Responsive Alerts: Customizable alerts ensure timely identification of critical issues.

In industries like finance and technology, Datadog is implemented for its monitoring capabilities across cloud architectures. Its ability to aggregate logs and provide a unified view enhances reliability in environments demanding high performance. By leveraging real-time insights and integration with platforms like AWS and Azure, organizations in these sectors efficiently manage their cloud infrastructures, ensuring optimal performance and proactive issue resolution.

Datadog

Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process, and updates application dependency maps in real-time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation, and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline. Learn more at https://instana.com.

Instana

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

Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions

Buyer's Guide

Datadog vs. Instana Dynamic APM

September 2025

Free Report: Datadog vs. Instana Dynamic APM

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