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 solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
"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)."
"It is easy to navigate the menu and create tests."
"Datadog is providing efficiency in the products we develop for the wireless device engineering department."
"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."
"The most valuable aspects of the product include the APM and profiler."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"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 important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"It is easy to change and move virtual servers."
"The installation process is easy. We have deployed it on the cloud. I have around 20 to 30 people using the solution in my company."
"This service could be less costly."
"While the tool is robust with many different capabilities, users would greatly benefit from more examples in the documentation."
"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that."
"At times, it can be hard to generate metrics out of logs."
"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"There is room for improvement when using multiple dashboards because they can become complicated to keep track of and use."
"Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
"The product's configuration for saving files could be improved."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
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.