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Datadog vs Pandora FMS 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 Network Monitoring Software
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
45th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
43rd
Ranking in Log Management
36th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
28th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.3%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

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.
Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The observability pipelines are the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."
"The feature I've found most valuable is the log search feature."
"It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
"I don't have to worry about upgrades with the AWS version."
"Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"Pandora's architecture is interesting. It's open so you can easily extend and enhance it. It's simpler to customize Pandora compared to other solutions. It's also scalable enough to support large environments."
"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
"Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
 

Cons

"The pricing should be less of a surprise."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"One area where the product could be improved is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)."
"I find the setup cost to be too expensive. The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100. I am evaluating the usage of this solution, however, it is too expensive."
"There could be more easily identifiable documentation on how to find different things on the platform."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."
"I spent longer than I should have figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables."
"In the future, we may have double the number of devices, and we do not want to have any issues with performance in the data display."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"A nice feature in the next release would be an automation module to run workflow actions."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"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."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"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."
"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."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"You have to pay for the number of agents and models that you are monitoring. I would rate the cost at three with one being the most expensive and five being the cheapest."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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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
Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Pandora FMS and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.