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Datadog vs Netdata comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Netdata
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
31st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
20th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.7%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netdata is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog3.7%
Netdata1.1%
Other95.2%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
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.
Yess Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Sre at Akamai Technologies
Real-time monitoring has improved incident detection and simplifies per-second troubleshooting
The key area for improvement is data retention and historical analysis. Netdata is excellent for real-time monitoring, but for long-term storage and deep historical insights, it usually needs to be integrated with other tools. Improving built-in long-term retention would make it more complete. Another area I see is data aggregation, where it correlates multiple nodes; while it provides great per-node visibility, having more advanced centralized views and correlations across systems would help in larger-scale environments. Customization of alerts and anomaly detection could also be enhanced. One area needing improvement is access control and security features. Stronger RBAC and user management would help control who can view data. Another area would be customization of dashboards, alerting integrations, and improving enterprise-level scalability features.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When I reflect on the ways we used to track down issues, I can't imagine how we ever managed before Datadog."
"The logging in general is one of my favorite features."
"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."
"If you are monitoring the metrics and insights in your application, and need help monitoring, then this is a great application to look into."
"Since we started using the product, we were able to create dashboards, and utilize APM, continuous profiling, RUM, and distributed tracing for production support and user trends."
"Each component complements the other, creating a cohesive system where data, logs, and metrics are seamlessly integrated."
"The features I have found most helpful are synthetic monitoring, APM, and alert features."
"Datadog's visibility and debugging features help me day-to-day; specifically, we had an application that was throwing a bunch of errors causing an issue in our production database, and using Datadog, we were able to immediately isolate the error and plan around it."
"The biggest ROI I have seen is in incident detection, with improvements of forty to fifty percent, troubleshooting time by thirty to forty percent, and productivity gains of around twenty-five to thirty percent."
"Netdata has positively impacted my organization by improving downtime and incident response workflows through real-time visibility into infrastructure and application performance."
 

Cons

"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"One key improvement we would like to see in a future Datadog release is the inclusion of certain metrics that are currently unavailable. Specifically, the ability to monitor CPU and memory utilization of AWS-managed Airflow workers, schedulers, and web servers would be highly beneficial for our organization."
"I would also like to see an improvement in the server's data extraction times, as sometimes it can take up to ten minutes to download a report for a critical issue that is costing us money."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"The wide range of products Datadog now offers can be a bit intimidating to developers."
"Support via tickets is absolutely terrible. It's the one obvious bad spot for Datadog."
"While the documentation is very good, there are areas that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details."
"Network device and performance monitoring could be improved, as we've faced some limitations in this area."
"The key area for improvement is data retention and historical analysis."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"This solution is budget friendly."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Transportation Company
64%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise100
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Netdata?
As I am going with the subscription-based model in the SaaS, the pricing and setup cost are very nice, and the setup is very easy since I am running the server inside GCP.
What needs improvement with Netdata?
Netdata can be improved by incorporating AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive monitoring capabilities to forecast potential bottlenecks. Additionally, broader native integrations with enterpr...
What is your primary use case for Netdata?
Netdata serves as my real-time monitoring and observability platform for infrastructure and application performance monitoring, providing highly detailed real-time metrics with minimal setup and lo...
 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Netdata and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.