Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Datadog vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Datadog enhances efficiency by optimizing resources, reducing downtime, and improving incident response, offering significant cost savings and performance benefits.
Sentiment score
7.3
Microsoft Defender for Cloud boosts security and efficiency, integrates with Azure, reduces costs, prevents breaches, and offers proactive defense.
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
I believe features that would provide a lot of time savings, just enabling you to really narrow down and filter the type of frustration or user interaction that you're looking for.
Defender proactively indexes and analyzes documents, identifying potential threats even when inactive, enhancing preventative security.
Identifying potential vulnerabilities has helped us avoid costly data losses.
The biggest return on investment is the rapid improvement of security posture.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog's customer service is praised, though technical support feedback is mixed; expertise and engagement are frequently appreciated.
Sentiment score
6.5
Microsoft Defender for Cloud support is responsive at higher levels, but experiences vary with mixed satisfaction due to delays.
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
Since security is critical, we prefer a quicker response time.
The support team was very responsive to queries.
They understand their product, but much like us, they struggle with the finer details, especially with new features.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog is praised for scalability, easy integration, and reliable performance, but users should monitor costs as usage increases.
Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is scalable, integrating across environments effortlessly, suitable for all enterprise sizes with flexible performance.
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
We did, as a trial, engage the AWS integration, and immediately it found all of our AWS resources and presented them to us.
Datadog's scalability is strong; we've continued to significantly grow our software, and there are processes in place to ensure that as new servers, realms, and environments are introduced, we're able to include them all in Datadog without noticing any performance issues.
We are using infrastructure as a code, so we do not have any scalability issues with Microsoft Defender for Cloud implementation because our cloud automatically does it.
It has multiple licenses and features, covering infrastructures from a hundred to five hundred virtual machines, without any issues.
Defender won't replace our endpoint XDR, but it will likely adapt and support any growth in the Microsoft Cloud space.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliability and stability, with occasional minor issues that are quickly resolved.
Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is stable and reliable, with minimal issues mainly during updates, ensuring strong user satisfaction.
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
These incidents are related to log service, indexes, and metric capturing issues.
Defender's stability has been flawless for us.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very stable.
Microsoft sometimes changes settings or configurations without transparency.
 

Room For Improvement

Datadog faces user complaints about performance, pricing, complexity, logging, notifications, integration, AI, cost control, and documentation.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud users seek better automation, clarity, integration, AI features, and comprehensive analytics for improved security management.
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
In future updates, I would like to see AI features included in Datadog for monitoring AI spend and usage to make the product more versatile and appealing for the customer.
Microsoft, in general, could significantly improve its communication and support.
It would be beneficial to streamline recommendations to avoid unnecessary alerts and to refine the severity of alerts based on specific environments or environmental attributes.
The artificial intelligence features could be expanded to allow the system to autonomously manage security issues without needing intervention from admins.
 

Setup Cost

Datadog pricing is high yet reasonable; flexible subscriptions are available, but usage-based costs require careful monitoring.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is scalable, offering free and paid versions with costs averaging $15 monthly per server.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive.
Every time we consider expanding usage, we carefully evaluate the necessity due to cost concerns.
We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters.
 

Valuable Features

Datadog offers unified data monitoring with extensive integrations, simplifying observability, debugging, analytics, and performance tracking across platforms.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud enhances security with AI-based threat detection, multi-cloud support, and a unified portal for comprehensive management.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
The most valuable feature for me is the variety of APIs available.
This feature significantly aids in threat detection and enhances the user experience by streamlining security management.
The most valuable feature is the recommendations provided on how to improve security.
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
207
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (7th), Container Management (9th), Container Security (7th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (1st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (8th), Compliance Management (5th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Datadog is 1.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 9.3%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud9.3%
Datadog1.9%
Other88.8%
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.
Vibhor Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps
Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions are best for your needs.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise95
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise45
 

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 ...
How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?
Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening across your ecosystem. It also has great remote workforce capabilities and supports a...
What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

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
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.