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Datadog vs WhatsUp Gold 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (3rd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
WhatsUp Gold
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
29th
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
22nd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
18th
Ranking in Log Management
39th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
23rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (14th), Configuration Management (20th), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.3%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 2.2%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.3%
WhatsUp Gold2.2%
Other95.5%
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.
EC
Technical Manager at Quan Hung Gourmet
Efficient monitoring with detailed customization, yet complexity remains
The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless. I have used the automated device discovery with this topology feature. The interactive map feature helps me manage the topology because sometimes we cannot draw the topology correctly, so we need to manually edit the connections. The alerting system is very tunable and customizable, but it's a little complicated to use. Many customers cannot manage it by themselves and need support from us, the provider. We always use the dashboards in the SOC, where we constantly display a dashboard or multiple dashboards. This allows us to know immediately if the connection or bandwidth is full or if the connection is broken.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by allowing for a more proactive response to issues whenever they occur."
"I really enjoy the RUM monitoring features of Datadog. It allows us to monitor user behavior in a way we couldn't before."
"The UI, basically, is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space."
"The initial setup was straightforward from my own experience, helping integrate within the application and service levels."
"Our primary alerts, based on metrics and synthetic transactions, are the most used and relied upon for decreased MTTA/MTTR across all of our platforms. This is followed by deep log analysis that enables us to quickly and easily get to a preliminary root cause that someone on the infrastructure, platform or development teams can take and focus their attention on the precise target that Datadog revealed as the issue to be remediated."
"The full stack of integrations made it easier to monitor the different technologies and platform providers, including Software as a Service providers, that otherwise would need a lot of work and customization to be able to see what is happening."
"The ease with which we can filter, use metrics, and give accounts to customers, then let the customer filter, set up metrics, and alerts. This has been a big win for us."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are the application monitors that allow for discreet roaming on network devices."
"Auto scanning is most valuable. It looks for rogue devices on your network."
"The new version has a lot of improved features."
"We no longer have to manually search for problems because we are alerted when something in the network goes down."
"Overall, we have been satisfied with the functionality of the product."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-discovery function."
"We primarily use the solution to check the state of the network, monitoring thousands of devices and all of the internal network, and it is the first tool we use to see the state of the network for real-time monitoring."
"We've been using it for many years and we use it typically for early warning, as it notifies customers of problems prior to failure."
 

Cons

"One area where Datadog can be improved is around alert quality. In the beginning, it tends to generate many alerts, and without proper tuning, many of them are not actionable."
"I believe Datadog could be improved because sometimes it's not the most user-friendly, and when monitors have a new metric or a service that no longer needs to be monitored, it remains in the system."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
"It is very difficult to make the solutions fit perfectly for large organizations, especially in terms of high cardinality objects and multi-tenancy, where the data needs to be rolled up to a summarized level while maintaining its individual data granularity and identifiers."
"We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions."
"The UI has a lot going on. It should be simpler and have a better way to onboard someone new to using Datadog."
"I would like to see the integration between PagerDuty and Datadog improved. The tags in Datadog don't match those in PagerDuty, and we have to make it work."
"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
"Importing the maps and being able to customize them could be easier."
"I might like to see a better interface in the future. It's not necessarily easy to integrate the product with other vendors."
"The initial setup of WhatsUp Gold is a medium range of difficulty levels. However, if it is your first time it could be difficult."
"I would like to see better integration with switches so that you can see what is connected to each port, what the traffic is, and have a network map automatically generated."
"We can never achieve or get a good picture of the network topology."
"Users want SMS available via Whatsapp Gold. They don't want to go through third party SMS servers. The solution should work to make this possible."
"Sometimes it's a little bit slow."
"One of the biggest things that made us start to look at another product is we're not able to have an end to end monitoring from a user perspective throughout the system and back to the user. All the monitoring is from inside out, we need something that also can give us from outside in."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"​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."
"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."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"There are some subscription charges that are quite heavy. I need to pay for support every year and these charges can be quite expensive. Aside from the initial cost for the tool, you need to pay additionally for support."
"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."
"Pricing is reasonable compared to other products."
"The price of WhatsUp Gold is good."
"I'm not sure, but it's expensive. We don't pay any additional fees."
"This is a well priced solution."
"The tool's price is reasonable. WhatsUp Gold is cheaper than SolarWinds."
"The choice of version depends on the number of points, or devices, that you want to monitor, and this makes the product expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
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 Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

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 your experience regarding pricing and costs for WhatsUp Gold?
Clients find the licensing calculator confusing, but we simplify this for them by collecting relevant information first. The licensing is based on devices, providing better cost-effectiveness than ...
What needs improvement with WhatsUp Gold?
It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complicated to manage.
What is your primary use case for WhatsUp Gold?
My use case for WhatsUp Gold includes all device availability checks, bandwidth usage, CPU, and memory usage, as well as alarm notifications.
 

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
Artoni Trasporti, Austin Independent School District, Banca Marche, Burke County North Carolina, Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine, Clayco, Community Integrated Care, Desca, Deutsche Bergbau, Flexi-Van, Gropper, Hamleys, Hammonds Furniture, Knowledge IT, Idras S.P.A., Sibeg, Swann Engineering, Trivium Lindenhof
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. WhatsUp Gold and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,456 professionals have used our research since 2012.