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Datadog vs SolarWinds NPM 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Datadog improves efficiency by reducing response time, optimizing resources, enhancing reliability, and saving costs through better infrastructure monitoring.
Sentiment score
6.8
SolarWinds NPM is praised for reducing costs, offering quick ROI, and enhancing network management with reliable alerts and reporting.
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We have also seen fewer escalations for minor issues because alerts help us catch problems earlier, which indirectly reduces downtime and improves overall efficiency.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
Network Administrator at PT Bni Life Insurance
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog's customer service is generally reliable and efficient, with recent improvements noted, despite occasional delays and communication issues.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM's customer service is praised, but technical support varies, with some users noting slow responses and availability issues.
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
Systems Administrator at Townsquare Interactive
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
If there is no timely response, getting a resolution is more difficult.
Network Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Regarding technical support from SolarWinds, I find it excellent.
Assistant Manager at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
Network Administrator at PT Bni Life Insurance
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Datadog excels in scalable performance and integration but requires careful ingestion cost management as environments grow.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM efficiently scales in large environments, but may require extra polling engines and face complex licensing challenges.
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Since it is a SaaS platform, we did not have to worry about backend scaling.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
We have not faced any major performance issues from the platform side; it handles increased metrics and monitoring loads smoothly.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
Solutions Architect at Boch Systems Company Limited
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for stability and reliability, with rare, quickly-resolved issues, especially during peak traffic periods.
Sentiment score
7.5
SolarWinds NPM is praised for stability, with resource allocation and documentation adherence mitigating most upgrade-related issues.
Metrics collection and alerting have been consistent in day-to-day use.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
Full Stack Developer at Townsquare Interactive
For stability, I rate SolarWinds NPM as a ten, which is the best.
Assistant Manager at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
Network Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Datadog needs better alert management, cost control, data representation, API consistency, integration, security, automation, navigation, and educational resources.
SolarWinds NPM requires enhancements in analytics, scalability, UI, security, integration, customization, monitoring, automation, stability, and cost-effectiveness.
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We want to be able to customize the cost part, and we would appreciate more granular access control.
Service Manager at PwC
Having more transparent and granular cost control features would make it easier to manage usage.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
Solutions Architect at Boch Systems Company Limited
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
Network Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment.
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Datadog offers scalable, usage-based pricing but requires careful monitoring to manage escalating costs and optimize feature utilization.
SolarWinds NPM offers a flexible licensing model with competitive pricing, though costs may rise for extensive setups.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Senior Performance and Architecture Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Pricing is mainly based on data ingestion, such as logs, metrics, and traces, and it can increase quickly if everything is enabled by default.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
The solution is considered expensive.
Network Administrator at PT Bni Life Insurance
Pricing-wise, SolarWinds NPM is more expensive than PRTG.
Solutions Architect at Boch Systems Company Limited
It is not too pricey and is adequate.
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Datadog enhances operational efficiency with unified visibility, integration, customizable dashboards, and comprehensive monitoring across cloud platforms.
SolarWinds NPM provides intuitive network monitoring with advanced customization, scalability, and proactive alerts, suiting diverse business needs.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
Senior Software Engineer at Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
Whenever any node is down in our network, whether it is a server or any network device, we receive information through email that the device is down.
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The ability to customize the dashboard in SolarWinds NPM provides key benefits like saving time and money, and streamlining some processes.
Assistant Manager at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
Network Administrator at PT Bni Life Insurance
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
2nd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.7%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.7%
Datadog2.4%
Other93.9%
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.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise100
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise87
 

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 is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

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
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
904,016 professionals have used our research since 2012.