We performed a comparison between Datadog and Grafana based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog offers impressive capabilities in dashboards, error reporting, ease of use, logs, and analysis, user-friendliness for development teams, and infrastructure monitoring. Grafana shines in creating visually appealing graphs, customization options, open-source nature, extensive visualization capabilities, import/export functionality, and capacity planning. Datadog has several areas for improvement including usability, integration, user interface intuitiveness, security features, organizational structure management, agent deployment, network monitoring, customization possibilities, and improved documentation for agent setup and debugging. Grafana could improve in data aggregation enhancement, expanding reporting types, logs integration for debugging, editing tool improvement, plugin capabilities expansion, and file-saving configuration improvement.
Service and Support: The opinions on Datadog's customer service are divided, as some users appreciate the quick and useful support, while others faced delays or unhelpful responses. Grafana's customer service has garnered positive feedback for being efficient and technically knowledgeable. Additionally, Grafana offers a valuable community forum for further assistance.
Ease of Deployment: Users generally find the initial setup for Datadog to be simple and uncomplicated, often with assistance from service providers or technical support. On the other hand, the initial setup for Grafana is mixed among users, as some find it easy while others report the need for resource optimization and tuning.
Pricing: Users express differing opinions on the pricing of Datadog, with some considering it expensive and others finding it reasonable compared to alternative solutions. Grafana provides a variety of choices, including a free open-source version, and offers moderately priced licensed options.
ROI: Users have different experiences with the ROI of Datadog, with some mentioned benefits such as time savings and reduced blind spots. On the other hand, Grafana is highly regarded for its data visualization and analytics capabilities.
Comparison Results: Grafana is the favored option when comparing it to Datadog. Users appreciate Grafana's customizable features, extensive visualization capabilities, and ability to create visually appealing graphs. The fact that Grafana is open source and cost-effective, with a supportive community, is also highly valued. Additionally, users find Grafana easy to use, with a friendly interface and helpful customer and technical support. Grafana's focus on data visualization and affordability makes it the preferred choice.
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"We have way more observability than what we had before - on the application and the overall system."
"It is easy to navigate the menu and create tests."
"It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale."
"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"The solution is sufficiently stable."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"We like the alert features."
"It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks elegance, efficiency, and complexity."
"Billing should be more transparent."
"I often have issues with the UI in my browser."
"We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions."
"I found the solution to be stable, I did not experience any bugs or glitches. However, some of the managing team did."
"The FinOps needs improvement."
"The product could do better with its notifications."
"Grafana need to improve the logging functionality."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"The product's configuration for saving files could be improved."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"The solution should include online support."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews while Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Grafana is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and SCOM, whereas Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and ITRS Geneos. See our Datadog vs. Grafana report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.