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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
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
210
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
29th
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 May 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.0%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Security Onion is 2.3%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.0%
Security Onion2.3%
Other93.7%
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.
Jörg Kippe - PeerSpot reviewer
Scientist at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
A mature and affordable solution that is easy to install and easy to update
The product takes time to learn, it's not that easy. In the beginning we had a lot of questions. If you want to use such a tool in an real (industrial) environment, you have to ask how to get the network data. Can we do a full packet capture? Can we provide agents to our end systems? There are no simple solutions to these questions. It's a general problem when running such systems in an industrial environment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Datadog helps us detect issues early on and helps in troubleshooting."
"We have hundreds of microservices, and knowing how top-level requests weave throughout all of them is invaluable."
"Datadog has alerting events and metrics all in one place; this was a huge plus, other solutions were trying to treat monitoring as a multi-faceted problem, while Datadog treated it as one problem."
"Straightforward to integrate and automate."
"One of the solution's greatest aspects is its overall simplicity; it is very easy to use and easier to handle than other brands we have access to."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."
"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

"More helpful log search keywords/tips would be helpful in improving Datadog's log dashboard."
"All solutions have some area to improve, and in Datadog they can improve their overall technology moving forward."
"Logging is not a great experience."
"The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that."
"The PagerDuty integration could be a little bit better."
"I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release."
"In production, we intend to use trace IDs generated by RUM to attach to support tickets when a user experiences a traceable network error, and we want to display this trace ID to the user so if they were to contact us about a specific issue, they can provide us an exact ID displayed to them back to us. Currently, this is not possible out-of-the-box client-side without inventing our own solution for capturing these trace IDs, such as shimming the native fetch or returning the ID from the service response."
"It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs."
"The product is not easy to learn."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"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."
"The tool is open-source."
"Security Onion is a free solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
University
12%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise47
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 ...
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Comparisons

 

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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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Security Onion and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.