We performed a comparison between Datadog and Prometheus based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog offers a range of valuable features such as dashboards, error reporting, log centralization, and user-friendliness. It also provides troubleshooting and instrumentation capabilities, as well as flexibility and additional features. The interface and integrations are praised, along with its performance and infrastructure monitoring capabilities. Prometheus is highly regarded for its extensive range of APIs and libraries, flexibility in integration, and reliability as a monitoring solution. Its valuable dashboard, scalability, and fast data storage system are also commendable. Users appreciate the numerous integrations and the flexibility to tailor monitoring applications.
Users have pointed out several areas where Datadog can improve, including usability, integration, user interfaces, learning curve, organizational structure management, and customization flexibility. Prometheus users have suggested improvements in the query language, setup process, DSL and analysis tools, UI color and interface, stability, and documentation.
Service and Support: Users highly appreciate the customer service of Datadog for its quick response time and always being available to assist them. They receive immediate answers and timely support. Prometheus relies more on its documentation and online community for support, resulting in less frequent interactions with customer service.
Ease of Deployment: Users generally find the initial setup of Datadog to be simple and uncomplicated, often receiving help from service providers or technical support. Setting up Prometheus can be more complex. While some users find it easy, others note a learning curve and the necessity of online resources.
Pricing: Users find the setup cost of Datadog to be relatively high, and they recommend exploring cheaper alternatives or a free trial option. Prometheus does not require any payment for setup or licensing, making it a cost-effective choice compared to Datadog and similar options.
ROI: Some users of Datadog have mentioned time savings and fast debugging as positive results. Prometheus users have also experienced positive outcomes and ROI from their monitoring activities.
Comparison Results: Users prefer Prometheus over Datadog due to its cost-effectiveness, variety of APIs and libraries for easy integration, and flexibility. They also appreciate Prometheus's user-friendly setup, valuable features like the dashboard and metric collection, and the availability of an active online community for support.
"Datadog's seamless integration with Slack and PagerDuty helped us to receive alerts right to the most common notification methods we use (our mobile devices and Slack)."
"The solution is sufficiently stable."
"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."
"Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc."
"Datadog documentation on web pages has improved a lot and is pretty easy to follow and find."
"Datadog is providing efficiency in the products we develop for the wireless device engineering department."
"Straightforward to integrate and automate."
"The visibility into our network has allowed for quick diagnosis of failures, identification of underutilized or over-utilized resources, and allowed for cloud cost optimization opportunities."
"Prometheus is a great solution for monitoring."
"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"It is an efficient solution."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus are the many functions available. The functions are helpful for understanding the behavior of applications and infrastructure."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"At the beginning, when we started throwing logs at it, there was a bit of hiccup. However, this was during their beta period, so hiccups were expected."
"We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard."
"The way data is represented can be limiting. When I first tried it out a long time ago, you could graph a metric and another metric, and they'd overlay, but you couldn't take the ratio between the two."
"The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances."
"It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."
"Datadog is expensive."
"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."
"Datadog could have a better business analysis module."
"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"Its documentation could be clearer to understand."
"There is a need for a more comprehensive overview of exporters, especially when dealing with many of them."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"The setup process could be more straightforward."
"When it comes to deployment, if you have no experience with something like a CI/CD pipeline, it might be a challenge."
"The scalability must be improved."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 136 reviews while Prometheus is ranked 9th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 32 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Prometheus is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prometheus writes "A very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and AppDynamics, whereas Prometheus is most compared with Azure Monitor, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sentry and AWS X-Ray. See our Datadog vs. Prometheus report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
