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 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."
"Its logs are most valuable."
"The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards."
"Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"Datadog's seamless integration with Slack and PagerDuty helped us to receive alerts right to the most common notification methods we use (our mobile devices and Slack)."
"Straightforward to integrate and automate."
"It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"Provides good dashboard visualization."
"Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"Grafana's best features are live monitoring and alerts."
"We like the alert features."
"Great capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
"This solution provides valuable insights into the health of our infrastructure in real time."
"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic. Datadog's price is also high."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"We want to reduce having to go to different screens to obtain all the information."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization."
"Lately, chat support has a longer waiting time."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"Grafana need to improve the logging functionality."
"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
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.