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Datadog vs Security Onion 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 Log Management
3rd
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 (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
20th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.7%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Security Onion is 3.7%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog4.7%
Security Onion3.7%
Other91.6%
Log Management
 

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.
Anish Bajracharya - PeerSpot reviewer
Postgraduate at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Provides good threat hunting by finding infected ports, but its initial setup is difficult
The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports. I have used the Squert tool within Security Onion the most for threat hunting The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult. I have been using Security Onion for one year.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."
"Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue."
"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"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."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Monitors have also been very valuable when setting up our on-call processes. It makes it easy to set up and adjust alerting to keep our teams aware of anything going wrong."
"Datadog will positively impact my organization by allowing me to handle ticket resolutions at a much faster pace and bring productivity by reducing the number of support engineers required at the monitoring level."
"The solution allows flexibility and heightened observability for presenting data, creating indicators, and setting service-level objectives."
"We use Security Onion for internal vulnerability assessment."
"The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports."
"Security Onion is the most mature solution in the market."
 

Cons

"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."
"Datadog has a lot of documentation, but a lot of that documentation assumes you know how the service works, which can lead to confusion."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"The Log Explorer could be better. I don't think it has log manipulation as Splunk does."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
"The product is not easy to learn."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"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."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
"Security Onion is a free solution."
"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
University
12%
Government
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
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 do you like most about Security Onion?
The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Security Onion?
Security Onion is an open-source solution. On a scale from one to ten, where ten is expensive and one is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.
What needs improvement with Security Onion?
The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult.
 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Security Onion and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.