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Datadog vs Sysdig Secure comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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 Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st)
Sysdig Secure
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
18th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (12th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (12th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Datadog is 1.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sysdig Secure is 2.0%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
Peter Du - PeerSpot reviewer
Gives real-time visibility and helps to articulate constantly-changing landscape
The main benefit for me personally is being able to articulate the ever-growing, dynamic, and constantly changing landscape. Just today, in a management leadership call, I was able to demonstrate that although we are solving a lot of these vulnerabilities, we are picking up new vulnerabilities each and every day. It allows me to articulate the importance of information security with actual real-time data. Sysdig's runtime insights help us detect and respond to threats that are happening in real-time. We can look at Sysdig dashboards or run reports to see precisely what happens in our runtime environment. A good use case of this was that when zero-day vulnerabilities came out, we could scan our environment to see if the vulnerabilities apply to any of our production workloads. Sysdig Secure helps us prioritize issues and distribute work. We are a small company, so we do not have multiple security or dev teams. We have two or three guys on my team. Having the ability to focus on critical vulnerabilities is crucial. It does not make sense to prioritize low-level threats when we have limited time. We do not use live threat investigation features as much as we would like because of different priorities, but it is something that we do use. Over time, it shows us whether we are putting the right effort into resolving issues. For example, when we look at the dashboard scene over a 30-day period, we can see whether the critical vulnerabilities are increasing or decreasing. It lets us know whether we are on the right track. We are currently using agentless scanning. Deploying it onto our cluster has enabled us to get full visibility into what is running on our cluster. Sysdig provides us with the contextual awareness we need to create an immediate incident response strategy. It provides links to the threat and explains the threat and the resolution possible. It equips us with the right information to make a decision on whether to address the threat immediately or take a risk in terms of deploying remediation. Sysdig has not enabled us to reduce the number of security tools we use. We were not using anything before Sysdig, and after choosing Sysdig, we did not have a need to look at anything else. Sysdig has not helped reduce external SOC costs. We are a very small business, so we do not have the budget for an external SOC. However, it has definitely alleviated the pressure to look for one and to source an external SOC. We have a project history to look at a virtual SOC and leverage tools that we do have, and Sysdig is a part of that. There is definitely a saving there because we have not had the need to go out and look for an external SOC. Sysdig has helped reduce the percentage of workloads that have security exposures that put the organization at risk. It has reduced the workload, mainly from an understanding of where we can assign work to cover the most ground in terms of resolving vulnerabilities.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Flame graphs are pretty useful for understanding how GraphQL resolves our federated queries when it comes to identifying slow points in our requests. In our microservice environment with 170 services."
"The initial setup was straightforward from my own experience, helping integrate within the application and service levels."
"It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale."
"Profiling has been made easier."
"We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."
"The visibility that it provides is valuable. It is helping in being proactive around incident management. It is helping us to be able to get more visibility into our customers' applications so that we can assist them at the application layer. We also provide them the infrastructure from an AWS standpoint. We are able to make sure that our customers are aware of certain critical things around the analytical piece of either the network or the application. We're able to call customers before they even know about the issue. From there, we can start putting together some change management processes and help them a bit."
"We really like the charts and visualization."
"Dashboards are helpful for reviewing occasionally to get a higher-level overview of what's happening."
"From a container-based standpoint, it offers excellent scalability to its users...I would tell those planning to use the solution that, from a container standpoint, it's excellent."
"The most valuable feature is the level of support that we get. Our solutions or customer success representative is very valuable. I see them as an extension of our security team."
"I see Sysdig as the most comprehensive solution in comparison to its competitors."
"I have not seen any stability issues so far."
"We appreciate this feature, especially when combined with CD monitoring. The implementation of requested features has been remarkable, such as scanning for compliance in CRM processes for the US government. We heavily rely on this feature to assess compliance with federal requirements."
"The tool has the capability to conduct scans initially. It can perform scans on your virtual machines, physical machines, containers, and container images. A standout feature is its ability to scan offline container images stored in your container registry. Additionally, it can scan runtime images in your cluster or on your host machine. This allows for the detection of vulnerabilities in running containers, including loaded libraries. Notably, the tool can identify which library vulnerabilities are already present in your system. An added advantage is its capacity to take action beyond threat detection. It has the ability to block access and respond to encountered threats."
"The proactiveness of the support has been fantastic. Every time we mention something in a meeting that we're trying to do, he proactively takes that as an investigation topic and looks into it. He'll provide the solution even though we might not have asked him to investigate it."
"Sysdig Secure has many strong foundational features like compliance and benchmark, security, network access management, and vulnerability management."
 

Cons

"More helpful log search keywords/tips would be helpful in improving Datadog's log dashboard."
"The product needs to have more enterprise approach to configuration."
"The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."
"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."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog."
"We'd like to see more advanced incident management capabilities integrated directly into the platform."
"Banks and financial institutions cannot use Sysdig Secure because it doesn't sell SaaS-hosted versions for under two hundred working nodes."
"The dashboard could be more simple and show the more important issues that are detected first. We'd like to be able to set it up so more important issues show up more prominently in the dashboard."
"There was a security concern related to a specific feature. While the feature itself was promising, it posed a challenge. The situation revolved around code scanning. If your source code is hosted within your own premises, say on Bitbucket, you naturally wouldn't want your code to be accessible to external parties beyond your company. Keeping your code base private is a standard practice. However, in the case of code scanning using Sysdig Secure, they copy your code to their SaaS platform. This posed an issue for us. When we inquired about this, their response acknowledged the concern. In an upcoming release, they plan to enable code scanning within your on-premises environment through the assistance of an agent. This change is already in progress. While this tool stands out compared to existing solutions in the market, it's important to note that there are still some limitations to consider. Another drawback we encountered relates to our expertise with Kubernetes. The tool can monitor Kubernetes audit logs, triggering alerts and notifications. However, it falls short in terms of taking direct action based on these alerts. There are different methods of event capture, including through system labels and system calls, as well as via Kubernetes audit events. Notably, at the system level, Sysdig Secure can both detect and respond to events, allowing actions like blocking and warning. This proactive approach is effective at the system call level. However, when it comes to monitoring Kubernetes audit events, Sysdig Secure can only notify without being able to execute any further actions. It can't block access or containers. The vendor likened their role to that of a monitoring camera, observing events and sending notifications without the capacity to intervene. This limitation applies to Kubernetes audit events. Given that everything operates within our system, there is a workaround available: configuring system-level policies to block containers as necessary."
"Reporting can definitely be better. Live dashboards should be configurable for a longer period of time rather than 30 days. Being able to go back in time to compare six months ago to today would be valuable."
"They should make it specific with a couple of features only."
"The solution needs to improve overall from a CSPM standpoint since they can't compete with Wiz or Orca."
"Sysdig Secure needs to scale more for complete cloud-native coverage."
"Perhaps, it could support more custom implementations, as our company utilizes custom implementations rather than standard ones. Configuring it requires a deep understanding and adjustment to our specific needs, which took some time. Other than that, I'm unsure about potential improvements. We were considering the possibility of compartmentalizing their tools. Currently, in Sysdig Secure, they bundle multiple features, and we are unable to use them individually. For instance, if we only need compliance scanning, we have to deploy the entire secure package. This is because of the way their agent functions, but I can't delve into more details."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"The solution's pricing depends on the agents...In short, the price depends on the environment of its user."
"I am always going to say that it could be a little bit cheaper. I do feel that it is a little bit on the expensive side."
"It is quite costly compared to other tools."
"Sysdig is competitive. The quality matches the pricing. Obviously, everyone wants things to be cheaper, but if you're realistic, you acknowledge that quality service comes with a price. Sysdig is the gold standard for Kubernetes, and I wouldn't choose anything else. We live in Kubernetes. Everything is containerized, so that means a lot to us, and we're willing to make an investment."
"In comparison to other cloud solutions, it's reasonably priced. However, when compared to in-house built open-source projects, it might be considered somewhat costly. The cost depends on whether someone sees the support provided by Sysdig as an advantage or if it's deemed unnecessary. Personally, I find the support to be excellent and consider it a good value."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
18%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 Sysdig Secure?
The proactiveness of the support has been fantastic. Every time we mention something in a meeting that we're trying to do, he proactively takes that as an investigation topic and looks into it. He'...
What needs improvement with Sysdig Secure?
Sysdig Secure could improve in terms of scalability and expanding services to other areas like database monitoring and support. There is also room for improvement in enhancing their platform speed....
What is your primary use case for Sysdig Secure?
Sysdig Secure ( /products/sysdig-secure-reviews ) is used for cloud-native infrastructure, application monitoring, and detection response.
 

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
SAP Concur, Goldman Sachs, Worldpay, Experian, BigCommerce, Arkose Labs, Calendly, Noteable, Bloomreach. More here: https://sysdig.com/customers/
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Sysdig Secure and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.