Checkmk vs. Datadog

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Checkmk
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Checkmk is a solution for IT Monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors. It can be deployed under all major Linux distributions or users can run it as Docker container or virtual appliance on other operating systems including Windows. The tool is available as a Raw Edition, which is open-source, and as an Enterprise Edition with a many additional enterprise features. The…
$0
up to 10 systems
Datadog
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Pricing
CheckmkDatadog
Editions & Modules
Checkmk Free Edition
$0.00
up to 10 systems
Checkmk Raw Edition
$0.00
unlimited & always free
Checkmk Enterprise Edition
starting at $600.00
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CheckmkDatadog
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup Fee$600 for up to 3,000 Services / around 100 hostsOptional
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CheckmkDatadog
Considered Both Products
Checkmk
Chose Checkmk
We moved over to Checkmk from Nagios which felt like a natural evolution at the time as the raw version is based on Nagios, I vaguely not having any major issues moving over at the time. We still use the Raw version but we are planning to move to the enterprise version in the …
Chose Checkmk
Checkmk free version is far superior to PRTG free version. For the paid versions PRTG was more efficient and easier to use. Checkmk provides unlimited services on their free version while PRTG is limited. We like to use the free version to avoid monthly or annual costs while …
Datadog
Chose Datadog
In terms of usability, I’ve found Datadog significantly more approachable and powerful compared to Elasticsearch, especially for day-to-day operational monitoring. Datadog offers a much more cohesive, user-friendly interface out of the box, with built-in support for metrics, …
Chose Datadog
Datadog is an all in one solution. It has everything in one place so you don't have to go from application to application and try to figure out what exactly happened. No more stitching database errors from one third party to backend errors in another to front end errors in …
Chose Datadog
the search query is very easy to search the logs
Chose Datadog
Datadog crushed the competition on price and offering more solutions in one product cutting down on implementation time and effort while ensuring that the "integration" between one of their offerings was completely compatible with any of the others. I'm sure it's not the case …
Chose Datadog
We've completely replaced New Relic with Datadog and find it easier to use and more comprehensive. Our AWS and Sentry usage will continue for now. But Datadog gives us a much broader coverage - we can monitor our AWS services and many other services that interact with them. …
Chose Datadog
Dynatrace was cheaper but, in my opinion, its setup, features, and overall user experience do not come close to what Datadog can offer, making it more of a pain to use and not worth the cheaper cost over Datadog (especially if migrating away from Datadog to dynatrace).

Chose Datadog
Better performance and visibility than what I was able to obtain out of AppDynamics

Their OnCall offering is very fresh still, but is already almost at parity with Splunk On Call (VictorOps)
Chose Datadog
The first reason for selecting Datadog was of course it's pricing which is quite better in terms of competitor like Appdynamics and splunk. Second thing is versatile services which they are offering on one platform which means entire end to end services can be monitor at one …
Chose Datadog
It's a one-stop solution for all our needs whereas in other open-source tools, we have an operational overhead to keep and manage the uptime of these tools as well and also manage their versioning, upgrade, and patching cycle. Also if there are any bugs then we have to raise an …
Chose Datadog
One of the most important reason is single agent configuration for all kinds of monitoring. It also proved an auto upgrade feature of agents that reduces the overhead. It also provides range of options when it comes to data visualization and dashboards. It also provide tagging …
Chose Datadog
Kubernetes with Prometheus and other open-source options. It is prone to more toil to set up but the stack can be largely replicated in open source technologies.
Chose Datadog
OEM and Vertica Management console are limited to their own databases whereas Datadog has the ability to monitor multiple types of databases.
Chose Datadog
New Relic was a good tool but had really pushy salespeople. They also released a product called infrastructure recently, and it was worse than their previous product (servers). The previous product was also free! Needless to say, we will not be going back to New Relic any time …
Chose Datadog
Easier to set up and integrate with other auxiliary tools. The cost was also a benefit along with self-service capabilities. We could set up Data Dog by ourselves, versus needing to bring additional consulting efforts to setup Dynatrace. Reliability of results (less false …
Chose Datadog
Ultimately, Datadog had the most already-built bridges into our existing infrastructure -- third parties that we're using for certain services are far more likely to work with Datadog than other systems. This means that, while expensive, Datadog has done a tremendous amount of …
Chose Datadog
Datadog has been harder to setup out-of-the-box compared to its alternatives, although it's graphs and dashboards have been more useful. Other tools handle individual tasks better. For example, Splunk has been the best logging tool I've used, and New Relic is great for CPU and …
Chose Datadog
It has been easier to work with Datadog for all our business needs and get things on their roadmap if we found it lacking. Currently we use a mix of various tools as they were existing prior to Datadog came. We are evaluating new offering like Datadog's latest log management to …
Chose Datadog
I am listing how Datadog is better than below chosen
NotSensu - Datadog has more integrations and easy to use UI.
Prometheus - Datadog Integration are more in number than, simple installation process
Chose Datadog
We are still trying other products, but people still like Datadog. After setting up a dashboard, it's great for monitoring instances on Datadog. Also, the DevOps team had a good time setting up Datadog. It means Datadog was way easier to set up compared to those others.
Chose Datadog
The pricing, the customer service and it most importantly it does the job we expect.
Chose Datadog
Geckoboard has nice dashboard options, however their third party system support isn't as strong as Datadog. Geckoboard did not support all the various server and development systems we use, whereas Datadog did. Also, Datadog has better alerting and monitoring options than …
Chose Datadog
Datadog empowers us to create dashboards and visualize the state of our infrastructure in real time. It gives us control over what we want to view and how. The graphs provide deep insight into trends and anamoly detectives. These features are lacking in some of the other …
Best Alternatives
CheckmkDatadog
Small Businesses
ConnectWise Automate
ConnectWise Automate
Score 8.3 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Icinga
Icinga
Score 7.8 out of 10
Logz.io
Logz.io
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprises
ScienceLogic SL1
ScienceLogic SL1
Score 8.9 out of 10
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CheckmkDatadog
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CheckmkDatadog
Likelihood to Recommend
In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.
Read full review
A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.
Read full review
Pros
  • monitoring
  • alerts
  • Graphs
Read full review
  • Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
  • Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
  • Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
  • DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
  • Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.
Read full review
Cons
  • Layout
  • Ease of Use
  • Upgradability
Read full review
  • Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
  • I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
  • I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Very helpful software and I highly recommend to have on hand as a tool for testing, troubleshooting, and monitoring.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Usability
Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.
Read full review
Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
We moved over to Checkmk from Nagios which felt like a natural evolution at the time as the raw version is based on Nagios, I vaguely not having any major issues moving over at the time. We still use the Raw version but we are planning to move to the enterprise version in the next 6 – 12 months as our needs expand.
Read full review
I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • avoid downtime
  • Plan updates based on usage of a VM or network switch to avoid impacting users
  • User satisfaction increased due to less visible downtime or issues with our IT infrastructure.
Read full review
  • Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
  • Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
  • Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of the out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog's collaboration features, where users can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify their teams, see who responded to that alert before, and discover what was done to fix it.Screenshot of where Datadog unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of some of Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map, which decomposes an application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of centralized log data, pulled from any source.