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 fact that everything is under a single pane of glass is really valuable, as developers don't have to spend their time copying correlation IDs across tools to find what they need."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the elastic container service."
"The most useful feature is the APM."
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"Datadog has clear dashboards and good documentation."
"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
"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 best thing about Prometheus is its integration."
"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."
"It is an efficient solution."
"The product’s scalability is valuable."
"The product is easy to maintain."
"It is a scalable solution."
"We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions."
"Alerting timing should be improved to be more fine-tuned and exact."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts."
"Some of the interface is still confusing to use."
"The way data is represented can be limiting. When I first tried it out a long time ago, you could graph a metric and another metric, and they'd overlay, but you couldn't take the ratio between the two."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"Stability of the product has been a concern for us outside of the primary monitoring agents."
"If you are not quite technical, it can be pretty hard to understand the way it works and how to query data in Prometheus."
"The scalability must be improved."
"The setup process could be more straightforward."
"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"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."
"The simplicity of the query language could be improved. The current query language is not easy to work with."
"The solution's error handling part could be improved."
"The product must improve its documentation."
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.
