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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
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
208
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (2nd), 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
21st
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
18th
Ranking in Log Management
35th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
22nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (15th), Configuration Management (20th), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.5%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 2.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.5%
WhatsUp Gold2.4%
Other95.1%
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 helped my organization improve a lot of response time because we get alerts the minute it happens, which is our only means to reduce incident response time."
"Our teams use Datadog more than they used their old observability tool—they're more production-aware, conscious of how their changes are impacting customers, how the changes they make to their application speed up or slow down their app, and the overall request flow."
"The intuitive user interface has been one of the most valuable features for us."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"Datadog provided us the ability to monitor our cloud infrastructure (network, servers, storage), platform/middleware (database, web/applications servers, business process automation), and business applications across our cloud providers."
"The APM has made observability and tracing more accessible to developers."
"The stability is great."
"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."
"One thing good about WhatsUp Gold is that it is fairly stable."
"The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless."
"There is a flow monitor option, so we can trace the source IP, the destination IP, and top talker feature in this."
"WhatsUp Gold is very easy to deploy."
"The most important features of WhatsUp Gold are the server health and uptime it provides. Additionally, WhatsUp Gold is a Windows-based solution which is a benefit."
"It is very good at monitoring the network and keeps us up to date on the status of internal devices."
"The most valuable features are network bandwidth monitoring and monitoring device health."
"We no longer have to manually search for problems because we are alerted when something in the network goes down."
 

Cons

"It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs."
"It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage."
"Users need to be aware of licensing control. With autodiscovery, the product can begin to come at a high cost."
"Technical support is slow. It takes forever to get responses from the support team."
"While the tool is robust with many different capabilities, users would greatly benefit from more examples in the documentation."
"We want to reduce having to go to different screens to obtain all the information."
"This service could be less costly."
"They could have better log reporting."
"My understanding is that there are better products out there that do a better job."
"The point system is not clear and clarity around this would improve our understanding of the system."
"Importing the maps and being able to customize them could be easier."
"The product is old and not updated."
"I might like to see a better interface in the future."
"Improvements are needed in integration, especially for WhatsApp call and messages."
"Improvements are needed in integration, especially for WhatsApp call and messages. Our region heavily uses WhatsApp Messenger for communication, and integration with this platform would be beneficial."
"WhatsUp Gold should work on real-time monitoring and configuration management. If they succeed in doing this, the solution will cover all the network troubleshooting aspects and will be a benefit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"​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."
"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."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"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."
"There is a license needed to use WhatsUp Gold."
"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."
"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."
"I'm not sure, but it's expensive. We don't pay any additional fees."
"The tool's price is reasonable. WhatsUp Gold is cheaper than SolarWinds."
"The pricing can be on the expensive side when considering competing products."
"It is per device, per year. The pricing is very clear. If you have a service agreement, you get all of your major upgrades and minor upgrades. It was under $10,000 to go all-in with all of the different add-ons for it."
"This is a well priced solution."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
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 do you like most about WhatsUp Gold?
The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network issue is good. When we see a network there will sometimes be a spot that has one l...
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.
 

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: April 2026.
886,932 professionals have used our research since 2012.