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 solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"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."
"It has a nice UI."
"Datadog is providing efficiency in the products we develop for the wireless device engineering department."
"It has enhanced the performance of my team."
"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."
"It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"Prometheus is an open-source product that helps mold and improve it per our requirements. It is a lightweight solution that gives you many different metrics you can use in your application. The product offers complete granularity of your infrastructure. It integrates seamlessly with other tools like Grafana, which offers dashboard visibility. Prometheus is an extensively used product. I haven't seen any organization that is not using it."
"The solution offers an easy way to install and scratch values."
"The scalability of Prometheus is very good."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring are its stability, robustness, and rich set of features."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is the ease of pulling the metrics."
"The most valuable features of the solution are metrics scraping capabilities and the open source community and support."
"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes."
"The real issue with this product is cost control."
"There are things about it that we would like to be fixed, such as it is taking averages of average. This results in data that we don't expect."
"It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
"More pre-configured "Monitor Alerts" would be helpful."
"The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person."
"I would like better navigability across pages."
"One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote."
"The query language in Prometheus is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The product must improve its documentation."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features to support custom use cases, like out-of-the-box test scenarios and threat-related use cases of its users."
"If you want to collect details of metrics, you should be able to write a query for it directly. I want the product to offer better queries for the metrics."
"If you are not quite technical, it can be pretty hard to understand the way it works and how to query data in Prometheus."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"The interface is not particularly user-friendly and that could be improved."
"The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience."
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.