We performed a comparison between Datadog and Prometheus based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog offers a range of valuable features such as dashboards, error reporting, log centralization, and user-friendliness. It also provides troubleshooting and instrumentation capabilities, as well as flexibility and additional features. The interface and integrations are praised, along with its performance and infrastructure monitoring capabilities. Prometheus is highly regarded for its extensive range of APIs and libraries, flexibility in integration, and reliability as a monitoring solution. Its valuable dashboard, scalability, and fast data storage system are also commendable. Users appreciate the numerous integrations and the flexibility to tailor monitoring applications.
Users have pointed out several areas where Datadog can improve, including usability, integration, user interfaces, learning curve, organizational structure management, and customization flexibility. Prometheus users have suggested improvements in the query language, setup process, DSL and analysis tools, UI color and interface, stability, and documentation.
Service and Support: Users highly appreciate the customer service of Datadog for its quick response time and always being available to assist them. They receive immediate answers and timely support. Prometheus relies more on its documentation and online community for support, resulting in less frequent interactions with customer service.
Ease of Deployment: Users generally find the initial setup of Datadog to be simple and uncomplicated, often receiving help from service providers or technical support. Setting up Prometheus can be more complex. While some users find it easy, others note a learning curve and the necessity of online resources.
Pricing: Users find the setup cost of Datadog to be relatively high, and they recommend exploring cheaper alternatives or a free trial option. Prometheus does not require any payment for setup or licensing, making it a cost-effective choice compared to Datadog and similar options.
ROI: Some users of Datadog have mentioned time savings and fast debugging as positive results. Prometheus users have also experienced positive outcomes and ROI from their monitoring activities.
Comparison Results: Users prefer Prometheus over Datadog due to its cost-effectiveness, variety of APIs and libraries for easy integration, and flexibility. They also appreciate Prometheus's user-friendly setup, valuable features like the dashboard and metric collection, and the availability of an active online community for support.
"The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents."
"Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."
"Datadog is providing efficiency in the products we develop for the wireless device engineering department."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the elastic container service."
"We've found it most useful for managing Rstudio Workbench, which has its own logs that would not be picked up via Cloudwatch."
"If we have a large load for users using our basic Datadog, it will immediately fire off an alert notifying us either something's wrong or not."
"The solution is sufficiently stable."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The product has an easy-to-understand interface."
"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring are its stability, robustness, and rich set of features."
"It lets me proactively identify and resolve system issues. This, in terms of, most of the time, really reduces downtime. Because when there are notifications on time when we engage it quickly on time, our downtime is highly reduced. So basically, Prometheus is for monitoring and alerting."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"The scalability of Prometheus is very good."
"It has lots of APIs and libraries to integrate with any kind of language."
"The good thing is it integrates well with the Grafana dashboard. It comes with a UI where you see everything as a graph."
"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."
"It can have an artificial intelligence component. Even though I can seamlessly look at end-to-end security, it would be better to have alerts and notifications powered by an AI engine. I am not sure if they have an AI component. We have not reached out to them or looked at it, but this is something that I keep on talking about within our company in terms of features. Such a feature would be good to have, and it would further optimize my Security Ops team's abilities."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"The setup process could be more straightforward."
"Prometheus has a learning curve when setting it up. It definitely requires a little bit more hands-on than other solutions. It is an open source solution which means you do need to go through and read the literature that they have online for setting it up. The setup could be made easier."
"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"Setting up the rules in Prometheus can be confusing, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"Its documentation could be clearer to understand."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews while Prometheus is ranked 9th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 32 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Prometheus is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prometheus writes "A very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability, whereas Prometheus is most compared with Azure Monitor, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sentry and AWS X-Ray. See our Datadog vs. Prometheus 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.