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Datadog vs Plixer Scrutinizer comparison

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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 Network Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (1st), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), AI Observability (1st)
Plixer Scrutinizer
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
76th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.2%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plixer Scrutinizer is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.2%
Plixer Scrutinizer0.5%
Other97.3%
Network Monitoring Software
 

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.
Ira Mulyanti - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Director at ARGA SOLUSI
An affordable product with great integration capabilities
Plixer Core Platform is a valuable feature and a good software. Plixer Scrutinizer uses NetFlow analysis to monitor whatever is there in a network. Price-wise, Plixer Scrutinizer is not an expensive product. Basically, Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that can integrate with any other brand or product in the market, so it is not an area of concern.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Thanks to frequent concurrent deployments, the DataDog alerts monitors allow us quickly detect issues if anything occurs."
"Give it a try. It is a good tool for creating statistics and analytics with data."
"The tool's deployment is easy."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"We chose Datadog over the other products that we evaluated because it had better features: notifications, alerting, and metric capture, and Datadog had the skill sets that we wanted at the time."
"Overall, the Data UI and the usability of customer features continue to improve."
"Several critical dashboards were created years ago and are still in use today."
"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"It's agnostic as far as what your network gear is. As long as it supports an sFlow, JFlow, NetFlow, some kind of flow monitoring, Plixer will support it very well."
"The ability to view the status of the top-10 at a glance is helpful. We immediately know which link is over-utilized or heavily used... and it's all in real-time."
"The reporting and generating troubleshooting reports would be the best feature; our host-to-host conversation reporting."
"The solution helps to enrich the data context of our network traffic. It allows me to see what applications are most in use on a slightly historical basis, going back a day or week at tops. It allows me to tune QoS or traffic shaping around what's being used. It saves me from having to unnecessarily upgrade, if I don't need to."
"We see things that we did not see before; it's opened up peoples' eyes among our network folks and overall it has had a good, positive impact."
"The most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer are its ease of use, accessibility, and UI."
"As a network engineer, the ability to identify what traffic on the link is consuming all the bandwidth at any given time, and provide immediate feedback to the business, is the most valuable feature."
"Visualization of the network traffic is the most valuable feature. It allows you to drill into information quite quickly."
 

Cons

"I find the training great. That said, it is set for the LCD (lowest common denominator). Of course, this is very helpful to sell the product, yet, to really utilize the product, you need to get more detailed."
"There could be more easily identifiable documentation on how to find different things on the platform."
"I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."
"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."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"While I like the ease of use, when compared with Tenable Nessus they could still improve their usability."
"At times, it can be hard to generate metrics out of logs."
"One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report."
"We were trying to set up some configuration, but it just wasn't quite working properly; we couldn't get it set up properly."
"Though Plixer Scrutinizer has network detection and response, it's an area that needs just a little more rounding out."
"The visual acuity of how it presents data can sometimes be confusing. It takes a bit for people to spin up how to look at the graphs."
"We couldn't get it set up properly."
"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work."
"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."
"Though Plixer Scrutinizer has network detection and response, it's an area that needs just a little more rounding out. Another room for improvement in the solution is its lack of SaaS offering which some customers were looking for. My company deals in small to medium businesses, mid-market, and some customers wanted the SaaS feature which Plixer Scrutinizer doesn't offer. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for it to have a SaaS offering because my company also deals with educational spaces and smaller businesses that just don't have the staff that can implement this. If there's either a managed service or SaaS-based offering to just make it a little easier for those types of customers, it would be a great addition to Plixer Scrutinizer."
"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information. E.g., if you wanted to deploy a new instance or disaster recovery, you could quite easily deploy and restore the config, as opposed to having to restore all the NetFlow data. If there was just a button that said "backup config information", that would be good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is better than some competing products."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"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."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The tool is open-source."
"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."
"There are no extra costs. It's about $8,000 a year. The bang for the buck (cost) is definitely a plus."
"The license is per device. We have 50 devices."
"Currently, the license for Plixer Scrutinizer is subscription-based and at a yearly fee. The price would depend on the amount of traffic you pull in. For example, there are several blocks from a 10K flow, a 40K flow, and a 100K flow, and based on the number of devices that you receive the flows from, that's the license, and it is not a per-interface pricing model, so that is a very strong, very competitive pricing feature of Plixer Scrutinizer. Licensing for the product is also not based on the number of storage, compared to some competing products that are priced based on the amount of storage you need, particularly based on the retention and the amount of data. Plixer Scrutinizer licensing is based on the device, and it's more in the direction of $10,000 because, with just $1,000, you don't have anything."
"The licensing cost for Plixer Scrutinizer is in the middle. It's not the cheapest, but it's not the most expensive. Its licensing model is based on how many exporters, how many devices export information to the system. Plixer Scrutinizer has different modules you could add such as the security module which would cost extra."
"We recently bought a license upgrade, so we will integrate more exporters. We upgraded from a 25 exporter license to a 50 exporter license. Therefore, there will be more flows, and this will be an extension. I don't know when we will purchase a faster server, because the server that we have is quite new."
"Our entire solution, amortized over five years, is in the vicinity of $40,000 to $50,000 a year."
"Compared to some of the other tools we have, it's incredibly reasonably priced."
"It's about €10,000 a year for initial license and yearly maintenance costs. In addition, the hardware costs are about €10,000 once every five years."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise100
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
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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
Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Plixer Scrutinizer and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,383 professionals have used our research since 2012.